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^LITTLE RIVERS 


A BOOK OF ESSAYS 
IN PROFITABLE IDLENESS 


BY 

HENRY VAN DYKE ^ 


“And suppose he take nothing, yet he enjoyeth a delightfull 
walk by pleasant Rivers, in sweet Pastures, amongst odoriferous 
Flowers, which gratifie his Senses, and delight his Mind; which 
Contentments induce many (who affect not Angling) to choose 
those places of pleasure fw'their summer Recreation and Health.” 

Col. Robert Venables, The Experienc'd Angler. 1662. 

/ 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
1920 



Copyright, 1895 , 1903 , 1920 , by Charles Scribners Sons 




MftV -8 1820 


©CI,A565919 - 




FOREWORD 

TO THE AVALON EDITION 


This edition is named after the old house 
where I live, — when not on a journey, or gone 
a-fishing, or following up some piece of work 
that calls me far away. 

It is a pleasant camp, this Avalon, with big, 
friendly trees around it, and an ancient garden 
behind it, and memories of the American Rev- 
olution built into its walls, and the gray towers 
of Princeton University just beyond the tree- 
tops. 

Far have I travelled from these walls, yet 
always on the same quest, and never forgetting 
‘‘the rock whence I was hewn.” Now I come 
back to gather up the things that have been 
written in my voyages of body and of spirit. 

The realities of faith are unshaken; the 
visions of hope undimmed; the shrines of love 
undefiled. And while I sit here assembling 
these pages, — an adventurous conservative, — I 
look forward to further journeys and to coming 
back to the same home. 

Henry van Dyke. 

Avalon, October 1, 1919. 




LITTLE mVEKS 




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DEDICATION 


To one who wanders by my side 
As cheerfully as waters glide; 

Whose eyes are brown as woodland streams, 
And very fair and full of dreams; 

Whose heart is like a mountain spring. 
Whose thoughts like merry rivers sing: 

To her — my little daughter Brooke — 

I dedicate this little book. 

SWIFTWATER, 

May, 1895. 


RE-DEDICATION 

How swift a score of years can pass ! 

You're wife and mother now, my lass, 

And down the trail where’er you go 
Your children follow in a row. 

Four lively lads, a merry maid, 

Trot after you through sun and shade; 

You share their troubles and their joys, 

A comrade to the girl and boys: 

You help them through their lesson-books. 

And lead them out by woodland brooks 

To learn the little river's lore 

Of flowing stream and biding shore- 

So now I dedicate anew 

This book of memories to you. 

And write your name, — but not in water, — 
Brooke of my heart, my grown-up daughter. 

Stlvanora, 

August, 1919. 



CONTENTS 


I. 

Prelude 

1 

II. 

Little Rivers 

7 

III. 

A Leaf of Spearmint 

33 

IV. 

Ampersand 

59 

V. 

A Handful of Heather 

81 

VI. 

The Ristigouche from a Horse-Yacht 

115 

VII. 

Alpenrosen and Goat’s Milk 

141 

VIII. 

Au Large 

181 

IX. 

Trout-Fishing in the Traun 

221 

X. 

At the Sign of the Balsam Bough 

243 

XI. 

A Song after Sundown 

277 


Index 

281 




PRELUDE 






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AN ANGLER’S WISH IN TOWN 


When tulips bloom in Union Square, 
And timid breaths of vernal air 
Go wandering down the dusty town. 
Like children lost in Vanity Fair ; 

When every long, unlovely row 
Of westward houses stands aglow 

And leads the eyes toward sunset shies. 
Beyond the hills where green trees grow ; 

Then weary seems the street parade. 

And weary books, and weary trade : 

I 'm only wishing to go a-fishing ; 

For this the month of May was made. 

I guess the pussy-willows now 
Are creeping out on every bough 
Along the brook ; and robins look 
For early worms behind the plough. 

The thistle-birds have changed their dun 
For yellow coats to match the sun ; 

And in the same array of flame 
The Dandelion Show^s begun. 

3 


PRELUDE 


The flocks of young anemones 
Are dancing round the budding trees : 

Who can help wishing to go a-flshing 
In days as full of joy as these? 

I think the meadow-lark^ s clear sound 
Leaks upward slowly from the ground. 

While on the wing the bluebirds ring 
Their wedding-bells to woods around : 

The flirting cheuxink calls his dear 
Behind the biLsh ; and very near. 

Where water flows, where green grass grows, 
Song-sparrows gently sing, “ Good cheer : ” 

And, best of all, through twilighfs calm 
The hermit-thrush repeats his psalm : 

How much I 'm wishing to go a-flshing 
In days so sweet with music* s balm I 

^T is not a proud desire of mine ; 

I ask for nothing superfine ; 

No heavy weight, no salmon great. 

To break the record, or my line : 

Only an idle little stream. 

Whose amber waters softly gleam. 

Where I may wade, through woodland shade. 
And cast the fly, and loaf, and dream : 

4 


AN ANGLER’S WISH IN TOWN 


Only a trout or twOy to dart 

From foaming pools, and try my art : 

No more I *m wishing — old-fashioned fishing. 
And just a day on Nature's heart. 

1894. 


5 


LITTLE KIVEKS 


“ There's no music like a little river's. It 'plays the same tune (and that’s 
the favourite) over and over again, and yet does not "weary of it like men 
fiddlers. It takes the mind out of doors ; and though "we should he grate~ 
ful for good houses, there is, after all, no house like God's out-of-doors. 
And lastly, sir, it quiets a man down like saying his 'prayers ." — ^Robert 
Louis Stevenson; Prince Otto. 


LITTLE RIVEES 


A RIVER is the most human and companion- 
able of all inanimate things. It has a life, 
a character, a voice of its own, and is as full of 
good fellowship as a sugar-maple is of sap. It 
can talk in various tones, loud or low, and of 
many subjects, grave and gay. Under fav- 
ourable circumstances it will even make a shift 
to sing, not in a fashion that can be reduced to 
notes and set down in black and white on a 
sheet of paper, but in a vague, refreshing man- 
ner, and to a wandering air that goes 

^^Over the hills and far away^ 

For real company and friendship, there is 
nothing outside of the animal kingdom that is 
comparable to a river. 

I will admit that a very good case can be 
made out in favour of some other objects of 
natural affection. For example, a fair apology 
has been offered by those ambitious persons 
who have fallen in love with the sea. But, 
after all, that is a formless and disquieting pas- 
sion. It lacks solid comfort and mutual con- 
fidence. The sea is too big for loving, and too 
9 


LITTLE RIVERS 


uncertain. It will not fit into our thoughts. 
It has no personality because it has so many. 
It is a salt abstraction. You might as well 
think of loving a glittering generality like “the 
American woman.” One would be more to 
the purpose. 

Mountains are more satisfying because they 
are more individual. It is possible to feel a 
very strong attachment for a certain range 
whose outline has grown familiar to our eyes, 
or a clear peak that has looked down, day after 
day, upon our joys and sorrows, moderating our 
passions with its calm aspect. We come back 
from our travels, and the sight of such a well- 
known mountain is like meeting an old friend 
unchanged. But it is a one-sided affection. 
The mountain is voiceless and imperturbable; 
and its very loftiness and serenity sometimes 
make us the more lonely. 

Trees seem to come closer to our life. They 
are often rooted in our richest feelings, and our 
sweetest memories, like birds, build nests in their 
branches. I remember, the last time that I saw 
James Russell Lowell, (only a few weeks before 
his musical voice was hushed,) he walked out 
with me into the quiet garden at Elmwood to 
say good-bye. There was a great horse-chest- 
nut tree beside the house, towering above the 
gable, and covered with blossoms from base to 
summit, — a pyramid of green supporting a 
10 


LITTLE RIVERS 


thousand smaller pyramids of white. The poet 
looked up at it with his gray, pain-furrowed 
face, and laid his trembling hand upon the 
trunk. ‘‘I planted the nut,” said he, ‘‘from 
which this tree grew. And my father was with 
me and showed me how to plant it.” 

Yes, there is a good deal to be said in behalf 
of tree-worship; and when I recline with my 
friend Tityrus beneath the shade of his favour- 
ite oak, I consent in his devotions. But when 
I invite him with me to share my orisons, or 
wander alone to indulge the luxury of grateful, 
unlaborious thought, my feet turn not to a 
tree, but to the bank of a river, for there the 
musings of solitude find a friendly accompani- 
ment, and human intercourse is purified and 
sweetened by the flowing, murmuring water. 
It is by a river that I would choose to make 
love, and to revive old friendships, and to play 
with the children, and to confess my faults, 
and to escape from vain, selfish desires, and to 
cleanse my mind from all the false and foolish 
things that mar the joy and peace of living. 
Like David’s hart, I pant for the water-brooks. 
There is wisdom in the advice of Seneca, who 
says, “Where a spring rises, or a river flows, 
there should we build altars and offer sacri- 
fices.” 

The personality of a river is not to be found 
in its water, nor in its bed, nor in its shore. 

11 


LITTLE RIVERS 


Any one of these elements, by itself, would be 
nothing. Confine the fiuid contents of the 
noblest stream in a walled channel of stone, and 
it ceases to be a stream; it becomes what 
Charles Lamb calls “a mockery of a river — a 
liquid artifice — a wretched conduit.” But take 
away the water from the most beautiful river- 
banks, and what is left.^ An ugly road with 
none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on the 
bosom of the earth. 

The life of a river, like that of a human 
being, consists in the union of soul and body, 
the water and the banks. They belong to- 
gether. They act and react upon each other. 
The stream moulds and makes the shore; hol- 
lowing out a bay here, and building a long 
point there; alluring the little bushes close to 
its side, and bending the tall slim trees over its 
current; sweeping a rocky ledge clean of every- 
thing but moss, and sending a still lagoon full 
of white arrow-heads and rosy knot-weed far 
back into the meadow. The shore guides and 
controls the stream; now detaining and now ad- 
vancing it; now bending it in a hundred sinuous 
curves, and now speeding it straight as a wild- 
bee on its homeward flight; here hiding the 
water in a deep cleft overhung with green 
branches, and there spreading it out, Hke a 
mirror framed in daisies, to reflect the sky and 
the clouds; sometimes breaking it with sudden 
12 


LITTLE RIVERS 


turns and unexpected falls into a foam of mu- 
sical laughter, sometimes soothing it into a 
sleepy motion like the flow of a dream. 

Is it otherwise with the men and women 
whom we know and like.^ Does not the spirit 
influence the form, and the form affect the spirit ? 
Can we divide and separate them in our affec- 
tions ? 

I am no friend to purely psychological at- 
tachments. In some unknown future they may 
be satisfying, but in the present I want your 
words and your voice with your thoughts, your 
looks and your gestures to interpret your feel- 
ings. The warm, strong grasp of Greatheart’s 
hand is as dear to me as the steadfast fashion 
of his friendships; the lively, sparkling eyes of 
the master of Rudder Grange charm me as 
much as the nimbleness of his fancy; and the 
firm poise of the Hoosier Schoolmaster’s shaggy 
head gives me new confidence in the solidity of 
his views of life. I like the pure tranquillity of 
Isabel’s brow as well as her 

^^most silver flow 

Of subtle-paced counsel in distress.*^ 

The soft cadences and turns in my lady Ka- 
trina’s speech draw me into the humour of her 
gentle judgments of men and things. The 
touches of quaintness in Angelica’s dress, her 
folded kerchief and smooth-parted hair, seem 
13 


LITTLE RIVERS 


to partake of herself, and enhance my admira- 
tion for the sweet order of her thoughts and her 
old-fashioned ideals of love and duty. Even 
so the stream and its channel are one life, and 
I cannot think of the swift, brown flood of the 
Batiscan without its shadowing primeval for- 
ests, or the crystalline current of the Boquet 
without its beds of pebbles and golden sand and 
grassy banks embroidered with flowers. 

Every country — or at least every country 
that is fit for habitation — ^has its own rivers; 
and every river has its own quality; and it is 
the part of wisdom to know and love as many 
as you can, seeing each in the fairest possible 
light, and receiving from each the best that it 
has to give. The torrents of Norway leap down 
from their mountain home with plentiful cata- 
racts, and run brief but glorious races to the 
sea. The streams of England move smoothly 
through green fields and beside ancient, sleepy 
towns. The Scotch rivers brawl through the 
open moorland and flash along steep Highland 
glens. The rivers of the Alps are born in icy 
caves, from which they issue forth with furious, 
turbid waters; but when their anger has been 
forgotten in the slumber of some blue lake, 
they flow down more softly to see the vineyards 
of France and Italy, the gray castles of Ger- 
many, the verdant meadows of Holland. The 
mighty rivers of the West roll their yellow floods 
14 


LITTLE RIVERS 


through broad valleys, or plunge down dark 
canons. The rivers of the South creep under 
dim arboreal archways hung with banners of 
waving moss. The Delaware and the Hudson 
and the Connecticut are the children of the 
Catskills and the Adirondacks and the White 
Mountains, cradled among the forests of spruce 
and hemlock, playing through a wild woodland 
youth, gathering strength from numberless trib- 
utaries to bear their great burdens of lumber 
and turn the wheels of many mills, issuing from 
the hills to water a thousand farms, and descend- 
ing at last, beside new cities, to the ancient sea. 

Every river that flows is good, and has some- 
thing worthy to be loved. But those that we 
love most are always the ones that we have 
known best, — the stream that ran before our 
father’s door, the cmrent on which we ventured 
our flrst boat or cast our first fly, the brook on 
whose banks we first picked the twinflower of 
young love. However far we may travel, we 
come back to Naaman’s state of mind: ‘‘Are 
not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, 
better than all the waters of Israel.^” 

It is with rivers as it is with people: the 
greatest are not always the most agreeable, 
nor the best to live with. Diogenes must have 
been an uncomfortable bedfellow: Antinous 
was bored to death in the society of the Em- 
peror Hadrian: and you can imagine much 
15 


LITTLE RIVERS 


better company for a walking trip than Napo- 
leon Bonaparte. Semiramis was a lofty queen, 
but I fancy that Ninus had more than one bad 
quarter-of-an-hour with her: and in ‘Hhe spa- 
cious times of great Elizabeth” there was many 
a milkmaid whom the wise man would have 
chosen for his friend, before the royal red- 
haired virgin. ‘T confess,” says the poet Cow- 
ley, ‘‘I love Littleness almost in all things. A 
little convenient Estate, a little chearful House, 
a little Company, and a very little Feast, and 
if I were ever to fall in Love again, (which is a 
great Passion, and therefore, I hope, I have 
done with it,) it would be, I think, with Pretti- 
ness, rather than with Majestical Beauty. I 
would neither wish that my Mistress, nor my 
Fortune, should be a Bona Roba, as Homer 
uses to describe his Beauties, hke a daughter of 
great Jupiter for the stateliness and largeness of 
her Person, but as Lucretius says: 

^Parvula, pumilio, XapCroiv jn/a, tota merum 

Now in talking about women it is prudent 
to disguise a prejudice like this, in the security 
of a dead language, and to intrench it behind 
a fortress of reputable authority. But in low- 
lier and less dangerous matters, such as we are 
now concerned with, one may dare to speak in 
plain English. I am all for the little rivers. 
Let those who will, chant in heroic verse the 
16 


LITTLE RIVERS 


renown of Amazon and Mississippi and Niagara, 
but my prose shall flow — or straggle along at 
such a pace as the prosaic muse may grant me 
to attain — in praise of Beaverkill and Never- 
sink and Swiftwater, of Saranac and Raquette 
and Ausable, of Allegash and Aroostook and 
Moose River. ^‘Whene’er I take my walks 
abroad/’ it shall be to trace the clear Rauma 
from its rise on the fjeld to its rest in the fjord ; 
or to follow the Ericht and the Halladale 
through the heather. The Ziller and the Sal- 
zach shall be my guides through the Tyrol; 
the Rotha and the Dove shall lead me into the 
heart of England. My sacriflcial flames shall 
be kindled with birch-bark along the wooded 
stillwaters of the Penobscot and the Peribonca, 
and my libations drawn from the pure current 
of the Ristigouche and the Ampersand, and 
my altar of remembrance shall rise upon the 
rocks beside the falls of Seboomok. 

I will set my affections upon rivers that are 
not too great for intimacy. And if by chance 
any of these little ones have also become famous, 
like the Tweed and the Thames and the Arno, 
I at least will praise them, because they are still 
at heart little rivers. 

If an open fire is, as Charles Dudley Warner 
says, the eye of a room; then surely a little river 
may be called the mouth, the most expressive 
feature, of a landscape. It animates and en- 
17 


LITTLE RIVERS 


livens the whole scene. Even a railway jour- 
ney becomes tolerable when the track follows 
the course of a running stream. 

What charming glimpses you catch from the 
window as the train winds along the valley of 
the French Broad from Asheville, or climbs 
the southern Catskills beside the JEsopus, or 
slides down the Pusterthal with the Rienz, or 
follows the Glommen and the Gula from Chris- 
tiania to Throndhjem. Here is a mill with its 
dripping, lazy wheel, the type of somnolent in- 
dustry; and there is a white cascade, foaming in 
silent pantomime as the train clatters by; and 
here is a long, still pool with the cows standing 
knee-deep in the water and swinging their tails 
in calm indijfference to the passing world; and 
there is a lone fisherman sitting upon a rock, 
rapt in contemplations of the point of his rod. 
For a moment you become a partner of his 
tranquil enterprise. You turn around, you 
crane your neck to get the last sight of his mo- 
tionless angle. You do not know what kind of 
fish he expects to catch, nor what species of 
bait he is using, but at least you pray that he 
may have a bite before the train swings around 
the next curve. And if perchance your wish 
is granted, and you see him gravely draw some 
unknown, reluctant, shining reward of patience 
from the water, you feel like swinging your hat 
from the window and crying out ‘‘Good luck !” 

18 


LITTLE RIVERS 


Little rivers seem to have the indefinable 
quality that belongs to certain people in the 
world, — the power of drawing attention with- 
out courting it, the faculty of exciting interest 
by their very presence and way of doing things. 

The most fascinating part of a city or town 
is that through which the water flows. Idlers 
always choose a bridge for their place of medi- 
tation when they can get it; and, failing that, 
you will find them sitting on the edge of a quay 
or embankment, with their feet hanging over 
the water. What a piquant mingling of in- 
dolence and vivacity you can enjoy by the river- 
side ! The best point of view in Rome, to my 
taste, is the Ponte San Angelo; and in Florence 
or Pisa I never tire of loafing along the Lung’ 
Arno. You do not know London until you 
have seen it from the Thames. And you will 
miss the charm of Cambridge unless you take 
a little boat and go drifting on the placid Cam, 
beneath the bending trees, along the backs of 
the colleges. 

But the real way to know a little river is not 
to glance at it here or there in the course of a 
hasty journey, nor to become acquainted with 
it after it has been partly civilised and spoiled 
by too close contact with the works of man. 
You must go to its native haunts; you must 
see it in youth and freedom; you must accom- 
modate yourself to its pace, and give yourself 


LITTLE EIVERS 


to its influence, and follow its meanderings 
whithersoever they may lead you. 

Now, of this pleasant pastime there are three 
principal forms. You may go as a walker, 
taking the river-side path, or making a way for 
yourself through the tangled thickets or across 
the open meadows. You may go as a sailor, 
launching your light canoe on the swift current 
and committing yourself for a day, or a week, 
or a month, to the delightful uncertainties of 
a voyage through the forest. You may go as a 
wader, stepping into the stream and going down 
with it, through rapids and shallows and deeper 
pools, until you come to the end of your cour- 
age and the dayhght. Of these three ways I 
know not which is best. But in all of them the 
essential thing is that you must be willing and 
glad to be led; you must take the little river 
for your guide, philosopher, and friend. 

And what a good guidance it gives you. 
How cheerfully it lures you on into the secrets 
of field and wood, and brings you acquainted 
with the birds and the flowers. The stream can 
show you, better than any other teacher, how 
nature works her enchantments with colour 
and music. 

Go out to the Beaver-kill 

the tassel4ime of spring 

and follow its brimming waters through the 
budding forests, to that corner which we call 
20 


LITTLE RIVERS 


the Painter’s Camp. See how the banks are 
all enamelled with the pale hepatica, the painted 
trillium, and the delicate pink-veined spring 
beauty. A httle later in the year, when the 
ferns are uncurhng their long fronds, the troops 
of blue and white violets will come dancing 
down to the edge of the stream, and creep ven- 
turously out to the very end of that long, moss- 
covered log in the water. Before these have 
vanished, the yellow crow-foot and the cinque- 
foil will appear, followed by the star-grass and 
the loose-strife and the golden St. John’s-wort. 
Then the unseen painter begins to mix the 
royal colour on his palette, and the red of the 
bee-balm catches your eye. If you are lucky, 
you may find, in midsummer, a slender fragrant 
spike of the purple-fringed orchid, and you 
cannot help finding the universal self-heal. Yel- 
low returns in the drooping flowers of the jewel- 
weed, and blue repeats itself in the trembhng 
hare-bells, and scarlet is glorified in the flaming 
robe of the cardinal-flower. Later still, the 
summer closes in a splendom* of bloom, with 
gentians and asters and golden-rod. 

You never get so close to the birds as when 
you are wading quietly down a little river, 
casting your fly deftly under the branches for 
the wary trout, but ever on the lookout for 
all the various pleasant things that nature has 
to bestow upon you. Here you shall come upon 
the cat-bird at her morning bath, and hear her 
21 


LITTLE RIVERS 


sing, in a clump of pussy-willows, that low, 
tender, confidential song which she keeps for 
the hours of domestic intimacy. The spotted 
sandpiper will run along the stones before you, 
crying, wet-feet y wet-feet and bowing and 
teetering in the friendliest manner, as if to show 
you the way to the best pools. In the thick 
branches of the hemlocks that stretch across the 
stream, the tiny warblers, dressed in a hundred 
colours, chirp and twitter confidingly above 
your head; and the Maryland yellow-throat, 
fiitting through the bushes like a little gleam 
of sunlight, calls witchery, witchery, witchery 
That plaintive, forsaken, persistent note, never 
ceasing, even in the noonday silence, comes 
from the wood-pewee, drooping upon the bough 
of some high tree, and complaining, like Mari- 
ana in the moated grange, weary, weary, 
weary 

When the stream runs out into the old clear- 
ing, or down through the pasture, you find other 
and livelier birds, — the robin, with his sharp, 
saucy call and breathless, merry warble; the 
bluebird, with his notes of pure gladness, and 
the oriole, with his wild, fiexible whistle; the 
chewink, bustling about in the thicket, talking 
to his sweetheart in French, ^^cMrie, cMrie!’^ 
and the song-sparrow, perched on his favourite 
hmb of a young maple, close beside the water, 
and singing happily, through sunshine and 


LITTLE RIVERS 


through rain. This is the true bird of the 
brook, after all: the winged spirit of cheerful- 
ness and contentment, the patron saint of little 
rivers, the fisherman’s friend. He seems to 
enter into your sport with his good wishes, and 
for an hour at a time, while you are trying 
every fly in your book, from a black gnat to a 
white miller, to entice the crafty old trout at 
the foot of the meadow-pool, the song-sparrow, 
close above you, will be chanting patience and 
encouragement. And when at last success 
crowns your endeavour, and the parti-coloured 
prize is glittering in your net, the bird on the 
bough breaks out in an ecstasy of congratula- 
tion: catch Hm, catch ’im, catch Hm ; oh, what 
a 'pretty fellow / sweet ! ” 

There are other birds that seem to have a 
very different temper. The blue- jay sits high 
up in the withered pine-tree, bobbing up and 
down, and calling to his mate in a tone of 
affected sweetness, salute-her, saMte-her,’^ but 
when you come in sight he flies away with a 
harsh cry of ^Hhief, thief ^ thief I The king- 
fisher, ruffling his crest in solitary pride on the 
end of a dead branch, darts down the stream at 
your approach, winding up his reel angrily as 
if he despised you for interrupting his fishing. 
And the cat-bird, that sang so charmingly 
while she thought herself unobserved, now tries 
to scare you away by screaming snake, snake 
23 


LITTLE RIVERS 


As evening draws near, and the light beneath 
the trees grows yellower, and the air is full of 
filmy insects out for their last dance, the voice 
of the little river becomes louder and more 
distinct. The true poets have often noticed 
this apparent increase in the sound of flowing 
waters at nightfall. Gray, in one of his letters, 
speaks of “hearing the murmur of many waters 
not audible in the daytime.” Wordsworth re- 
peats the same thought almost in the same 
words: 

‘‘A soft and lulling sound is heard 
Of streams inaudible by day,'* 

And Tennyson, in the valley of Cauteretz, 
tells of the river 

^‘Deepening his voice with deepening of the night," 

It is in this mystical hour that you will hear 
the most celestial and entrancing of all bird- 
notes, the songs of the thrushes, — the hermit, 
and the wood-thrush, and the veery. Some- 
times, but not often, you will see the singers. 
I remember once, at the close of a beautiful 
day’s fishing on the Swiftwater, I came out, just 
after sunset, into a little open space in an elbow 
of the stream. It was still early spring, and 
the leaves were tiny. On the top of a small 
sumac, not thirty feet away from me, sat a 
veery. I could see the pointed spots upon his 


LITTLE RIVERS 


breast, the swelling of his white throat, and the 
sparkle of his eyes, as he poured his whole 
heart into a long liquid chant, the clear notes 
rising and falling, echoing and interlacing in 
endless curves of sound, 

within orb, intricate, wonderful, 

Other bird-songs can be translated into words, 
but not this. There is no interpretation. It 
is music, — as Sidney Lanier defines it, — 

^^Love in search of a word'' 

But it is not only to the real life of birds and 
flowers that the little rivers introduce you. 
They lead you often into familiarity with human 
nature in undress, rejoicing in the liberty of 
old clothes, or of none at all. People do not 
mince along the banks of streams in patent- 
leather shoes or crepitating silks. Corduroy 
and home-spun and flannel are the stuffs that 
suit this region; and the frequenters of these 
paths go their natural gaits, in calf-skin or rub- 
ber boots, or bare-footed. The girdle of con- 
ventionality is laid aside, and the skirts rise 
with the spirits. 

A stream that flows through a country of up- 
land farms will show you many a pretty bit of 
genre painting. Here is the laundry-pool at 
the foot of the kitchen garden, and the tubs are 
25 


LITTLE RIVERS 


set upon a few planks close to the water, and 
the farmer’s daughters, with bare arms and 
gowns tucked up, are wringing out the clothes. 
Do you remember what happened to Ralph 
Peden in The Lilac Sunbonnet when he came on 
a scene like this? He tumbled at once into 
love with Winsome Charteris, — and far over his 
head. 

And what a pleasant thing it is to see a little 
country lad riding one of the plough-horses to 
water, thumping his naked heels against the 
ribs of his stoUd steed, and pulling hard on the 
halter as if it were the bridle of Bucephalus ! 
Or perhaps it is a riotous company of boys that 
have come down to the old swimming-hole, 
and are now splashing and gambolling through 
the water like a drove of white seals very much 
sun-burned. You had hoped to catch a goodly 
trout in that hole, but what of that? The 
sight of a harmless hour of mirth is better than 
a fish, any day. 

Possibly you will overtake another fisherman 
on the stream. It may be one of those fabulous 
countrymen, with long cedar poles and bed- 
cord lines, who are commonly reported to catch 
such enormous strings of fish, but who rarely, 
so far as my observation goes, do anything 
more than fill their pockets with fingerlings. 
The trained angler, who uses the finest tackle, 
26 


LITTLE RIVERS 


and drops his fly on the water as accurately as 
Henry James places a word in a story, is the 
man who takes the most and the largest flsh 
in the long run. Perhaps the fisherman ahead 
of you is such an one, — a man whom you have 
known in town as a lawyer or a doctor, a mer- 
chant or a preacher, going about his business 
in the hideous respectability of a high silk hat 
and a long black coat. How good it is to see 
him now in the freedom of a flannel shirt and 
a broad-brimmed gray felt with flies stuck 
around the band. 

In Professor John Wilson’s Essays Critical 
and Imaginative, there is a brilliant description 
of a bishop fishing, which I am sure is drawn 
from the life: ‘‘Thus a bishop, sans wig and 
petticoat, in a hairy cap, black jacket, corduroy 
breeches and leathern leggins, creel on back 
and rod in hand, sallying from his palace, im- 
patient to reach a famous salmon-cast ere the 
sun leave his cloud, . . . appears not only a 
pillar of his church, but of his kind, and in such 
a costume is manifestly on the high road to 
Canterbury and the Kingdom-Come.” I have 
had the good luck to see quite a number of 
bishops, parochial and diocesan, in that style, 
and the vision has always dissolved my doubts 
in regard to the validity of their claim to the 
true apostolic succession. 

27 


LITTLE RIVERS 


Men’s ‘‘little ways” are usually more inter- 
esting, and often more instructive than their 
grand manners. When they are off guard, 
they frequently show to better advantage than 
when they are on parade. I get more pleasure 
out of Boswell’s Johnson than I do out of 
Rasselas or The Rambler. The Little Flowers of 
St. Francis appear to me far more precious 
than the most learned German and French 
analyses of his character. There is a passage 
in Jonathan Edwards’ Personal Narrative, about 
a certain walk that he took in the fields 
near his father’s house, and the blossoming of 
the flowers in the spring, which I would not 
exchange for the whole of his dissertation On 
the Freedom of the Will. And the very best 
thing of Charles Darwin’s that I know is a bit 
from a letter to his wife: “At last I fell asleep,” 
says he, “on the grass, and awoke with a chorus 
of birds singing around me, and squirrels run- 
ning up the tree, and some woodpeckers laugh- 
ing; and it was as pleasant and rural a scene 
as ever I saw; and I did not care one penny 
how any of the birds or beasts had been formed.” 

Little rivers have small responsibilities. They 
are not expected to bear huge navies on their 
breast or supply a hundred-thousand horse- 
power to the factories of a monstrous town. 
Neither do you come to them hoping to draw 
28 


LITTLE EIVERS 


out Leviathan with a hook. It is enough if 
they run a harmless, amiable course, and keep 
the groves and fields green and fresh along their 
banks, and offer a happy alternation of nimble 
rapids and quiet pools, 

^^With here and there a lusty trout. 

And here and there a grayling 

When you set out to explore one of these 
minor streams in your canoe, you have no in- 
tention of epoch-making discoveries, or thrill- 
ing and world-famous adventures. You float 
placidly down the long stillwaters, and make 
your way patiently through the tangle of fallen 
trees that block the stream, and run the smaller 
falls, and carry your boat around the larger 
ones, with no loftier ambition than to reach a 
good camp-ground before dark and to pass the 
intervening hours pleasantly, ‘^without offence 
to God or man.” It is an agreeable and ad- 
vantageous frame of mind for one who has done 
his fair share of work in the world, and is not 
inchned to grumble at his wages. There are 
few moods in which we are more susceptible of 
gentle instruction; and I suspect there are many 
tempers and attitudes, often called virtuous, in 
which the human spirit appears to less advan- 
tage in the sight of Heaven. 

It is not required of every man and woman- 
29 


LITTLE RIVERS 


to be, or to do, something great; most of us 
must content ourselves with taking small parts 
in the chorus. Shall we have no little lyrics 
because Homer and Dante have written epics 
And because we have heard the great organ at 
Freiburg, shall the sound of Kathi’s zither in 
the alpine hut please us no more.^ Even those 
who have greatness thrust upon them will do 
well to lay the burden down now and then, and 
congratulate themselves that they are not al- 
together answerable for the conduct of the 
universe, or at least not all the time. ‘‘I 
reckon,” said a cowboy to me one day, as we 
were riding through the Bad Lands of Dakota, 
“there ’s some one bigger than me, running 
this outfit. He can ’tend to it well enough, 
while I smoke my pipe after the round-up.” 

There is such a thing as taking ourselves and 
the world too seriously, or at any rate too 
anxiously. Half of the secular unrest and dis- 
mal, profane sadness of modern society comes 
from the vain idea that every man is bound 
to be a critic of life, and to let no day pass with- 
out finding some fault with the general order 
of things, or projecting some plan for its im- 
provement. And the other half comes from 
the greedy notion that a man’s life does consist, 
after all, in the abundance of the things that 
he possesses, and that it is somehow or other 
30 


LITTLE RIVERS 


more respectable and pious to be always at 
work making a larger living, than it is to lie on 
your back in the green pastures and beside the 
still waters, and thank God that you are alive. 

Come, then, my gentle reader, (for by this 
time you have discovered that this chapter is 
only a preface in disguise, — a declaration of 
principles or the want of them, an apology or 
a defence, as you choose to take it,) and if we 
are agreed, let us walk together; but if not, 
let us part here without ill-will. 

You shall not be deceived in this book. It 
is nothing but a handful of rustic variations on 
the old tune of ‘‘Rest and be thankful,” a record 
of unconventional travel, a pilgrim’s scrip with 
a few bits of blue-sky philosophy in it. There 
is, so far as I know, very little useful informa- 
tion and absolutely no criticism of the universe 
to be found in this volume. So if you are what 
Izaak Walton calls “a severe, sour-complex- 
ioned man,” you would better carry it back to 
the bookseller, and get your money again, if 
he will give it to you, and go your way rejoicing 
after your own melancholy fashion. 

But if you care for plain pleasures, and in- 
formal company, and friendly observations on 
men and things, (and a few true fish-stories,) 
then perhaps you may find something here not 
unworthy your perusal. And so I wish that 
31 


LITTLE RIVERS 


your winter fire may burn clear and bright 
while you read these pages; and that the sum- 
mer days may be fair, and the fish may rise 
merrily to your fly, whenever you follow one 
of these httle rivers. 

1895. 


32 


A LEAF OF SPEAKMINT 


RECOLLECTIONS OF A BOY AND A ROD 


“/< puzzles me now, that I remember all these young impressions so, be- 
cause I took no heed of them at the time whatever ; and yet they come upon 
me bright, when nothing else is evident in the gray fog of experience '* — 
R. D. Blackmore: Loma Doone. 


A LEAF OF SPEAEMINT 


/^F all the faculties of the human mind, mem- 
ory is the one that is most easily “led by 
the nose.” There is a secret power in the sense 
of smell which draws the mind backward into 
the pleasant land of old times. 

If you could paint a picture of Memory, in 
the symbolical manner of Quarles’s Emblems, it 
should represent a man travelling the highway 
with a dusty pack upon his shoulders, and 
stooping to draw in a long, sweet breath from 
the small, deep-red, golden-hearted flowers of 
an old-fashioned rose-tree straggling through 
the fence of a neglected garden. Or perhaps, 
for a choice of emblems, you would better take 
a yet more homely and famihar scent: the cool 
fragrance of lilacs drifting through the June 
morning from the old bush that stands between 
the kitchen door and the well; the warm layer 
of pungent, aromatic air that floats over the 
tansy-bed in a still July noon; the drowsy dew 
of odour that falls from the big balm-of-Gilead 
tree by the roadside as you are driving home- 
ward through the twilight of August; or, best 
of all, the clean, spicy, unexpected, unmistak- 
35 


LITTLE RIVERS 


able smell of a bed of spearmint — that is the 
bed whereon Memory loves to lie and dream ! 

Why not choose mint as the symbol of re- 
membrance? It is the true spice-tree of our 
Northern clime, the myrrh and frankincense of 
the land of lingering snow. When its perfume 
rises, the shrines of the past are unveiled, and 
the magical rites of reminiscence begin. 

I 

You are fishing down the Swiftwater in the 
early Spring. In a shallow pool, which the 
drought of summer will soon change into dry 
land, you see the pale-green shoots of a little 
plant thrusting themselves up between the 
pebbles, and just beginning to overtop the fall- 
ing water. You pluck a leaf of it as you turn 
out of the stream to find a comfortable place 
for lunch, and, rolling it between your fingers 
to see whether it smells like a good salad for 
your bread and cheese, you discover suddenly 
that it is new mint. For the rest of that day 
you are bewitched; you follow a stream that 
runs through the country of Auld Lang Syne, 
and fill your creel with the recollections of a 
boy and a rod. 

And yet, strangely enough, you cannot re- 
call the boy himself at all distinctly. There is 
only the faintest image of him on the endless 
36 


A LEAF OF SPEARMINT 


roll of films that has been wound through your 
mental camera: and in the very spots where 
his small figure should appear, it seems as if 
the pictures were always light-struck. Just a 
blur, and the dim outline of a new cap, or a 
well-beloved jacket with extra pockets, or a 
much hated pair of copper-toed shoes — that is 
all you can see. 

But the people that the boy saw, the com- 
panions who helped or hindered him in his ad- 
ventures, the sublime and marvellous scenes 
among the Catskills and the Adirondacks and 
the Green Mountains, in the midst of which he 
lived and moved and had his summer holidays 
• — all these stand out sharp and clear, as the 
‘‘Bab Ballads” say, 

^^Photographically lined 
On the tablets of your mindy 

And most vivid do these scenes and people be- 
come when the vague and irrecoverable boy 
who walks among them carries a rod over his 
shoulder, and you detect the soft bulginess of 
wet fish about his clothing, and perhaps the 
tail of a big one emerging from his pocket. 
Then it seems almost as if these were things 
that had really happened, and of which you 
yourself were a great part. 

The rod was a reward, yet not exactly of 
merit. It was an instrument of education in 
37 


LITTLE RIVERS 


the hand of a father less indiscriminate than 
Solomon, who chose to interpret the test in a 
new way, and preferred to educate his child 
by encouraging him in pursuits which were 
harmless and wholesome, rather than by chas- 
tising him for practices which would likely 
enough never have been thought of, if they had 
not been forbidden. The boy enjoyed this kind 
of father at the time, and later he came to un- 
derstand, with a grateful heart, that there is no 
richer inheritance in all the treasury of unearned 
blessings. For, after all, the love, the patience, 
the kindly wisdom of a grown man who can 
enter into the perplexities and turbulent im- 
pulses of a boy’s heart, and give him cheerful 
companionship, and lead him on by free and 
joyful ways to know and choose the things that 
are pure and lovely and of good report, make as 
fair an image as we can find of that loving, 
patient Wisdom which must be above us all 
if any good is to come out of our childish race. 

Now this was the way in which the boy came 
into possession of his undreaded rod. He was 
by nature and heredity one of those predestined 
anglers whom Izaak Walton tersely describes as 
‘‘born so.” His earliest passion was fishing. 
His favourite passage in Holy Writ was that 
place where Simon Peter throws a line into the 
sea and pulls out a great fish at the first cast. 

But hitherto his passion had been indulged 
38 


A LEAF OF SPEARMINT 


under difficulties — with improvised apparatus of 
cut poles, and flabby pieces of string, and bent 
pins, which always failed to hold the biggest 
fish; or perhaps wdth borrowed tackle, dangling 
a fat worm in vain before the noses of the 
staring, supercilious sunfish that poised them- 
selves in the clear water around the Lake House 
dock at Lake George; or, at best, on picnic 
parties across the lake, marred by the humili- 
ating presence of nurses, and disturbed by the 
obstinate refusal of old Horace, the boatman, to 
believe that the boy could bait his own hook, 
but sometimes crowned with the delight of 
bringing home a whole basketful of yellow perch 
and goggle-eyes. Of nobler sport with game 
fish, like the vaulting salmon and the merry, 
pugnacious trout, as yet the boy had only 
dreamed. But he had heard that there were 
such fish in the streams that flowed down from 
the mountains around Lake George, and he 
was at the happy age when he could believe 
anything — if it was sufficiently interesting. 

There was one little river, and only one, 
within his knowledge and the reach of his short 
legs. It was a tiny, lively rivulet that came 
out of the woods about half a mile away from 
the hotel, and ran down cater-cornered through 
a sloping meadow, crossing the road under a 
flat bridge of boards, just beyond the root-beer 
shop at the lower end of the village. It seemed 
39 


LITTLE RIVERS 


large enough to the boy, and he had long had 
his eye upon it as a fitting theatre for the be- 
ginning of a real angler’s life. Those rapids, 
those falls, those deep, whirhng pools with 
beautiful foam on them like soft, white custard, 
were they not such places as the trout loved 
to hide in.^ 

You can see the long hotel piazza, with the 
gossipy groups of wooden chairs standing va- 
cant in the early afternoon; for the grown-up 
people are dallying with the ultimate nuts and 
raisins of their mid-day dinner. A villainous 
clatter of innumerable little vegetable-dishes 
comes from the open windows of the pantry as 
the boy steals past the kitchen end of the house, 
with Horace’s lightest bamboo pole over his 
shoulder, and a little brother in skirts and short 
white stockings tagging along behind him. 

When they come to the five-rail fence where 
the brook runs out of the field, the question is. 
Over or under ? The lowlier method seems 
safer for the little brother, as well as less con- 
spicuous for persons who desire to avoid pub- 
licity until their enterprise has achieved suc- 
cess. So they crawl beneath a bend in the 
lowest rail, — only tearing one tiny three-cor- 
nered hole in a jacket, and making some juicy 
green stains on the white stockings, — and emerge 
with suppressed excitement in the field of the 
cloth of buttercups and daisies. 

40 


A LEAF OF SPEARMINT 


What an afternoon — how endless and yet 
how swift ! What perilous efforts to leap across 
the foaming stream at its narrowest points; 
what escapes from quagmires and possible quick- 
sands; what stealthy creeping through the grass 
to the edge of a likely pool, and cautious drop- 
ping of the line into an unseen depth, and pa- 
tient waiting for a bite, until the restless little 
brother, prowling about below, discovers that 
the hook is not in the water at all, but lying on 
top of a dry stone, — thereby proving that pa- 
tience is not the only virtue — or, at least, that 
it does a better business when it has a small 
vice of impatience in partnership with it ! 

How tired the adventurers grow as the day 
wears away; and as yet they have taken noth- 
ing ! But their strength and courage return as 
if by magic when there comes a surprising twitch 
at the line in a shallow, unpromising rapid, and 
with a jerk of the pole a small, wigghng fish is 
whirled through the air and landed thirty feet 
back in the meadow. 

‘‘For pity’s sake, don’t lose him! There he 
is among the roots of the blue fiag.” 

“ I’ve got him ! How cold he is — how slippery 
— how pretty ! Just like a piece of rainbow !” 

“Do you see the red spots Did you notice 
how gamy he was, little brother; how he played ? 
It is a trout, for sure; a real trout, almost as 
long as your hand.” 


41 


LITTLE RIVERS 


So the two lads tramp along up the stream, 
chattering as if there were no rubric of silence 
in the angler’s code. Presently another simple- 
minded troutling falls a victim to their unpre- 
meditated art; and they begin already, being 
human, to wish for something larger. In the 
very last pool that they dare attempt — a dark 
hole under a steep bank, where the brook issues 
from the woods — the boy drags out the hoped- 
for prize, a splendid trout, longer than a new 
lead-pencil. But he feels sure that there must 
be another, even larger, in the same place. 
He swings his line out carefully over the water, 
and just as he is about to drop it in, the little 
brother, perched on the sloping brink, slips on 
the smooth pine-needles, and goes sliddering 
down into the pool up to his waist. How he 
weeps with dismay, and how funnily his dress 
sticks to him as he crawls out! But his grief 
is soon assuaged by the privilege of carrying the 
trout strung on an alder twig; and it is a happy, 
muddy, proud pair of urchins that climb over 
the fence out of the field of triumph at the close 
of the day. 

What does the father say, as he meets them 
in the road? Is he frowning or smiling under 
that big brown beard? You cannot be quite 
sure. But one thing is clear: he is as much 
elated over the capture of the real trout as any 
one. He is ready to deal mildly with a little 


A LEAF OF SPEARMINT 


irregularity for the sake of encouraging pluck 
and perseverance. Before the three comrades 
have reached the hotel, the boy has promised 
faithfully never to take his little brother off 
again without asking leave; and the father has 
promised that the boy shall have a real jointed 
fishing-rod of his own, so that he will riot need 
to borrow old Horace’s pole any more. 

At breakfast the next morning the family are 
to have a private dish; not an every-day affair 
of vulgar, bony fish that nurses can catch, but 
trout — three of them ! But the boy looks up 
from the table and sees the adored of his soul, 

Annie V , sitting at the other end of the 

room, and faring on the common food of mor- 
tals. Shall she eat the ordinary breakfast 
while he feasts on dainties ? Do not other 
sportsmen send their spoils to the ladies whom 
they admire.^ The waiter must bring a hot 

plate, and take this largest trout to Miss V 

(Miss Annie, not her sister — make no mistake 
about it). 

The face of Augustus is as solemn as an 
ebony idol while he plays his part of Cupid’s 
messenger. The fair Annie affects surprise; 
she accepts the offering rather indifferently; 
her curls drop down over her cheeks to cover 
some small confusion. But for an instant the 
corner of her eye catches the boy’s sidelong 
glance, and she nods perceptibly, whereupon 
43 


LITTLE RIVERS 


his mother very inconsiderately calls attention 
to the fact that yesterday’s escapade has sun- 
burned his face dreadfully. 

Beautiful Annie V , who, among all the 

unripened nymphs that played at hide-and- 
seek among the maples on the hotel lawn, or 
waded with white feet along the yellow beach 
beyond the point of pines, flying with merry 
shrieks into the woods when a boat-load of 
boys appeared suddenly around the corner, or 
danced the lancers in the big, bare parlours be- 
fore the grown-up ball began — who in all that 
joyous, innocent bevy could be compared with 
you for charm or daring ? How your dark eyes 
sparkled, and how the long brown ringlets 
tossed around your small head, when you stood 
up that evening, slim and straight, and taller 
by half a head than your companions, in the 
lamp-lit room where the children were playing 
forfeits, and said, ‘‘There is not one boy here 
that dares to kiss me Then you ran out on 
the dark porch, where the honeysuckle vines 
grew up the tall, inane Corinthian pillars. 

Did you blame the boy for following.^ And 
were you very angry, indeed, about what hap- 
pened, — until you broke out laughing at his 
cravat, which had slipped around behind his 
ear.^ That was the first time he ever noticed 
how much sweeter the honeysuckle smells at 
night than in the day. It was his entrance ex- 
44 


A LEAF OF SPEARMINT 


amination in the school of nature — human and 
otherwise. He felt that there was a whole con- 
tinent of newly discovered poetry within him, 
and worshipped his Columbus disguised in 
curls. Your boy is your true idealist, after 
all, although (or perhaps because) he is still 
uncivilised. 

II 

The arrival of the rod, in four joints, with an 
extra tip, a brass reel, and the other luxuries 
for which a true angler would wilhngly exchange 
the necessaries of life, marked a new epoch in 
the boy’s career. At the uphfting of that 
wand, as if it had been in the hand of another 
Moses, the waters of infancy rolled back, and 
the way was opened into the promised land, 
whither the tyrant nurses, with all their proud 
array of baby-chariots, could not follow. The 
way was open, but not by any means dry. 
One of the first events in the dispensation of 
the rod was the purchase of a pair of high 
rubber boots. Inserted in this armour of mod- 
ern infantry, and transfigured with delight, 
the boy clumped through all the little rivers 
within a circuit of ten miles from Caldwell, and 
began to learn by parental example the yet 
unmastered art of complete angling. 

But because some of the streams were deep 
and strong, and his legs were short and slender, 

45 


LITTLE RIVERS 


and his ambition was even taller than his boots, 
the father would sometimes take him up pick- 
aback, and wade along carefully through the 
perilous places — which are often, in this world, 
the very places one longs to fish in. So, in 
your remembrance, you can see the little rubber 
boots sticking out under the father’s arms, and 
the rod projecting over his head, and the bait 
dangling down unsteadily into the deep holes, 
and the delighted boy hooking and playing and 
basketing his trout high in the air. How maily 
of our best catches in fife are made from some 
one else’s shoulders ! 

From this summer the whole earth became to 
the boy, as Tennyson describes the lotus coun- 
try, “a land of streams.” In school-days and 
in town he acknowledged the sway of those 
mysterious and irresistible forces which produce 
tops at one season, and marbles at another, 
and kites at another, and bind all boyish hearts 
to play mumble-the-peg at the due time more 
certainly than the stars are bound to their 
orbits. But when vacation came, with its 
annual exodus from the city, there was only 
one sign in the zodiac, and that was Pisces. 

No country seemed to him tolerable without 
trout, and no landscape beautiful unless en- 
livened by a young river. Among what de- 
lectable mountains did those watery guides lead 
his vagrant steps, and with what curious, mixed, 
46 


A LEAF OF SPEx\RMINT 


and sometimes profitable company did they 
make him familiar ! 

There was one exquisite stream among the 
Alleghanies, called Lycoming Creek, beside 
which the family spent a summer in a decadent 
inn, kept by a tremulous landlord who was 
always sitting on the steps of the porch, and 
whose most memorable remark was that he 
had ‘‘a misery in his stomach.” This form of 
speech amused the boy, but he did not in the 
least comprehend it. It was the description 
of an unimaginable experience in a region 
which was as yet known to him only as the 
seat of pleasure. He did not understand how 
any one could be miserable when he could catch 
trout from his own dooryard. 

The big creek, with its sharp turns from side 
to side of the valley, its hemlock-shaded falls 
in the gorge, and its long, still reaches in the 
‘‘sugar-bottom,” where the maple-trees grew 
as if in an orchard, and the superfluity of grass- 
hoppers made the trout fat and dainty, was too 
wide to fit the boy. But nature keeps all sizes 
in her stock, and a smaller stream, called Rocky 
Run, came tumbling down opposite the inn, as 
if made to order for juvenile use. 

How well you can follow it, through the old 
pasture overgrown with alders, and up past the 
broken-down mill-dam and the crumbling sluice, 
into the mountain-cleft from which it leaps 
47 


LITTLE RIVERS 


laughing ! The water, except just after a rain- 
storm, is as transparent as glass — old-fashioned 
window-glass, I mean, in small panes, with 
just a tinge of green in it, like the air in a grove 
of young birches. Twelve feet down in the 
narrow chasm below the falls, where the water 
is full of tiny bubbles, like Apollinaris, you can 
see the trout poised, with their heads up- 
stream, motionless, but quivering a little, as if 
they were strung on wires. 

The bed of the stream has been scooped out 
of the solid rock. Here and there banks of sand 
have been deposited, and accumulations of loose 
stone disguise the real nature of the channel. 
Great boulders have been rolled down the alley- 
way and left where they chanced to stick; the 
stream must get around them or under them 
as best it can. But there are other places 
where everything has been swept clean; noth- 
ing remains but the primitive strata, and the 
flowing water merrily tickles the bare ribs of 
mother earth. Whirling stones, in the spring 
floods, have cut well-holes in the rock, as round 
and even as if they had been made with a drill, 
and sometimes you can see the very stone that 
sunk the well lying at the bottom. There are 
long, straight, sloping troughs through which 
the water runs hke a mill-race. There are huge 
basins into which the water rumbles over a 
ledge, as if some one were pouring it very 
48 


A LEAF OF SPEARMINT 


steadily out of a pitcher, and from which it 
glides away without a ripple, flowing over a 
smooth pavement of rock which shelves down 
from the shallow foot to the deep head of the 
pool. 

The boy wonders how far he dare wade out 
along that slippery floor. The water is within 
an inch of his boot-tops now. But the slope 
seems very even, and just beyond his reach a 
good flsh is rising. Only one step more, and 
then, like the wicked man in the psalm, his feet 
begin to slide. Slowly, and standing bolt up- 
right, with the rod held high above his head, 
as if it must on no account get wet, he glides 
forward up to his neck in the ice-cold bath, 
gasping with amazement. There have been 
other and more serious situations in life into 
which, unless I am mistaken, you have made 
an equally unwilling and embarrassed entrance, 
and in which you have been surprised to find 
yourself not only up to your neck, but over, — 
and you are a lucky man if you have had the 
presence of mind to stand still for a moment, 
before wading out, and make sure at least of 
the fish that tempted you into your predica- 
ment. 

But Rocky Run, they say, exists no longer. 
It has been blasted by miners out of all re- 
semblance to itself, and bewitched into a dingy 
water-power to turn wheels for the ugly giant, 
49 


LITTLE RIVERS 


Trade. It is only in the valley of remembrance 
that its current still flows like liquid air; and 
only in that country that you can still see the 
famous men who came and went along the banks 
of the Lycoming when the boy was there. 

There was Collins, who was a wondrous adept 
-at ‘‘daping, dapping, or dibbling” with a grass- 
hopper, and who once brought in a string of 
trout which he laid out head to tail on the grass 
before the house in a line of beauty forty-seven 
feet long. A mighty bass voice had this Col- 
lins also, and could sing, ‘‘Larboard Watch, 
Ahoy!” “Down in a Coal-Mine,” and other 
profound ditties in a way to make all the glasses 
on the table jingle; but withal, as you now 
suspect, rather a fishy character, and unde- 
serving of the unqualified respect which the 
boy had for him. And there was Dr. Romsen, 
lean, satirical, kindly, a skilful though reluctant 
physician, who regarded it as a personal injury 
if any one in the party fell sick in summer 
time; and a passionately unsuccessful hunter, 
who would sit all night in the crotch of a tree 
beside an alleged deer-lick, and come home per- 
fectly satisfied if he had heard a hedgehog 
grunt. It was he who called attention to the 
discrepancy between the boy’s appetite and his 
size by saying loudly at a picnic, “I would n’t 
grudge you what you eat, my boy, if I could 
only see that it did you any good,” — which re- 
50 


A LEAF OF SPEARMINT 


mark was not forgiven until the doctor redeemed 
his reputation by pronouncing a serious medical 
opinion, before a council of mothers, to the effect 
that it did not really hurt a boy to get his feet 
wet. That was worthy of Galen in his most 
inspired moment. And there was hearty, genial 
Paul Merit, whose mere company was an edu- 
cation in good manners, and who could eat 
eight hard-boiled eggs for supper without ruf- 
fling his equanimity; and the tall, thin, grin- 
ning Major, whom an angry Irishwoman once 
described as ‘Tike a comb, all back and teeth;” 
and many more were the comrades of the boy’s 
father, all of whom he admired, (and followed 
when they would let him), but none so much 
as the father himself, because he was the wisest, 
kindest, and merriest of all that merry crew, 
now dispersed to the uttermost parts of the 
earth and beyond. 

Other streams played a part in the education 
of that happy boy: the Kaaterskill, where there 
had been nothing but the ghosts of trout for 
the last thirty years, but where the absence of 
fish was almost forgotten in the joy of a first 
introduction to Dickens, one very showery 
day, when dear old Ned Mason built a smoky 
fire in a cave below Haines’s Falls, and, pulling 
The Old Curiosity Shop out of his pocket, read 
aloud about Little Nell until the tears ran down 
the cheeks of reader and listener — the smoke 
51 


LITTLE RIVERS 

was so thick, you know: and the Neversink, 
which flows through John Burroughs’s country, 
and past one house in particular, perched on a 
high bluff, where a very dreadful old woman 
comes out and throws stones at ‘‘city fellers 
fishin’ through her land” (as if any one wanted 
to touch her land ! It was the water that ran 
over it, you see, that carried the fish with it, 
and they were not hers at all): and the stream 
at Healing Springs, in the Virginia mountains, 
where the medicinal waters flow down into a 
lovely wild brook without injuring the health 
of the trout in the least, and where the only 
drawback to the angler’s happiness is the abun- 
dance of rattlesnakes — but a boy does not mind 
such things as that; he feels as if he were im- 
mortal. Over all these streams memory skips 
lightly, and strikes a trail through the woods 
to the Adirondacks, where the boy made his 
first acquaintance with navigable rivers, — that 
is to say, rivers which are traversed by canoes 
and hunting-skiffs, but not yet defiled by 
steamboats, — and slept, or rather lay awake, 
for the first time on a bed of balsam-boughs in 
a tent. 

Ill 

The promotion from all-day picnics to a two 
weeks’ camping-trip is hke going from school to 
college. By this time a natural process of evo- 
52 


A LEAF OF SPEARMINT 


lution has raised the first rod to something 
lighter and more flexible, — a fly-rod, so to speak, 
but not a bigoted one, — ^just a serviceable, un- 
prejudiced article, not above using any kind of 
bait that may be necessary to catch the fish. 
The father has received the new title of ""gov- 
ernor,” indicating not less, but more authority, 
and has called in new instructors to carry on 
the boy’s education: real Adirondack guides — 
old Sam Dunning and one-eyed Enos, the last 
and laziest of the Saranac Indians. Better 
men will be discovered for later trips, but none 
more amusing, and none whose woodcraft seems 
more wonderful than that of this queerly 
matched team, as they make the first camp in 
a pelting rain-storm on the shore of Big Clear 
Pond. The pitching of the tents is a lesson in 
architecture, the building of the camp-fire a 
victory over damp nature, and the supper of 
potatoes and bacon and fried trout a veritable 
triumph of culinary art. 

At midnight the rain is pattering persistently 
on the canvas; the front flaps are closed and 
tied together; the lingering fire shines through 
them, and sends vague shadows wavering up 
and down: the governor is rolled up in his 
blankets, sound asleep. It is a very long night 
for the boy. 

What is that rustling noise outside the tent.^ 
Probably some small creature, a squirrel or a 
53 


LITTLE RIVERS 


rabbit. Rabbit stew would be good for break- 
fast. But it sounds louder now, almost loud 
enough to be a fox, — there are no wolves left in 
the Adirondacks, or at least only a very few. 
That is certainly quite a heavy footstep prowling 
around the provision-box. Could it be a pan- 
ther, — they step very softly for their size, — 
or a bear perhaps.^ Sam Dunning told about 
catching one in a trap just below here. (Ah, 
my boy, you will soon learn that there is no 
spot in all the forests created by a bountiful 
Providence so poor as to be without its bear 
story.) Where was the rifle put.^ There it is, 
at the foot of the tent-pole. Wonder if it is 
loaded ? 

‘ ‘ W augh-ho ! W augh-ho-o-o-o ! ’ ’ 

The boy springs from his blankets like a cat, 
and peeps out between the tent-flaps. There 
sits Enos, in the shelter of a leaning tree by the 
fire, with his head thrown back and a bottle 
poised at his mouth. His lonely eye is cocked 
up at a great horned owl on the branch above 
him. Again the sudden voice breaks out: 

^'Whoo ! whoo ! whoo cooks for you all 

Enos puts the bottle down, with a grunt, and 
creeps off to his tent. 

‘‘De debbil in dat owl,” he mutters. ‘^How 
he know I cook for dis camp? How he know 
’bout dat bottle? Ugh!” 

There are hundreds of pictures that flash into 
54 


A LEAF OF SPEARMNIT 


light as the boy goes on his course, year after 
year, through the woods. There is the luxurious 
camp on Tupper’s Lake, with its log cabins in 
the spruce-grove, and its regiment of hungry 
men who ate almost a deer a day; and there is 
the little bark shelter on the side of Mount 
Marcy, where the governor and the boy, with 
baskets full of trout from the Opalescent River, 
are spending the night, with nothing but a fire 
to keep them warm. There is the North Bay 
at Moosehead, with Joe La Croix (one more 
Frenchman who thinks he looks like Napoleon) 
posing on the rocks beside his canoe, and only 
reconciled by his vanity to the wasteful pastime 
of taking photographs while the big fish are 
rising gloriously out at the end of the point. 
There is the small spring-hole beside the Saranac 
River, where Pliny Robbins and the boy caught 
twenty-three noble trout, weighing from one to 
three pounds apiece, in the middle of a hot 
August afternoon, and hid themselves in the 
bushes whenever they heard a party coming 
down the river, because they did not care to 
attract company; and there are the Middle 
Falls, where the governor stood on a long spruce 
log, taking two-pound fish with the fly, and 
stepping out at every cast a little nearer to the 
end of the log, until it slowly tipped with him, 
and he settled down into the river. 

Among such scenes as these the boy pursued 
55 


LITTLE RIVERS 


his education, learning many things that are 
not taught in colleges; learning to take the 
weather as it comes, wet or dry, and fortune 
as it falls, good or bad; learning that a meal 
which is scanty fare for one becomes a banquet 
for two — provided the other is the right per- 
son; learning that there is some skill in every- 
thing, even in digging bait, and that what is 
called luck consists chiefly in having your 
tackle in good order; learning that a man can 
be just as happy in a log shanty as in a brown- 
stone mansion, and that the very best pleasures 
are those that do not leave a bad taste in the 
mouth. And in all this the governor was his 
best teacher and his closest comrade. 

Dear governor, you have gone out of the wil- 
derness now, and your steps will be no more 
beside these remembered little rivers — no more, 
forever and forever. You will not come in 
sight around any bend of this clear Swiftwater 
stream where you made your last cast; your 
cheery voice will never again ring out through 
the deepening twilight where you are lingering 
for your disciple to catch up with you; he will 
never again hear you call: “Hallo, my boy! 
What luck.^ Time to go home!” But there 
is a river in the country where you have gone, 
is there not? — a river with trees growing all 
along it — evergreen trees; and somewhere by 
those shady banks, within sound of clear run- 
56 


A LEAF OF SPEARMINT 


ning waters, I think you will be dreaming and 
waiting for your boy, if he follows the trail that 
you have shown him even to the end. 

1895. 






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H. 






AMPERSAND 


**lt is not the walking merely, it is keeping yourself in tune for a walk, 
in the spiritual and bodily condition in which you can find entertainment 
and exhilaration in so simple and natural a pastime. You are eligible to 
any good fortune when you are in a condition to enjoy a walk. When the 
air and water taste sweet to you, how much else will taste sweet I When the 
exercise of your limbs affords you pleasure, and the play of your senses 
upon the various objects and shows of Nature quickens and stimulates 
your spirit, your relation to the world and to yourself is what it should be, 
— simple, and direct, and wholesome .” — John Burroughs: Pepacton. 


AMPERSAND 


right to the name of Ampersand, like the 
^ territory of Gaul in those Commentaries 
which Julius Caesar wrote for the punishment of 
school-boys, is divided into three parts. It 
belongs to a mountain, and a lake, and a little 
river. 

The mountain stands in the heart of the Adi- 
rondack country, just near enough to the thor- 
oughfare of travel for thousands of people to 
see it every year, and just far enough from the 
beaten track to be unvisited except by a very 
few of the wise ones, who love to turn aside. 
Behind the mountain is the lake, which no lazy 
man has ever seen. Out of the lake flows the 
stream, winding down a long, untrodden forest 
valley, to join the Stony Creek waters and 
empty into the Raquette River. 

Which of the three Ampersands has the prior 
claim to the name, I cannot tell. Philosophi- 
cally speaking, the mountain ought to be re- 
garded as the head of the family, because it 
was undoubtedly there before the others. And 
the lake was probably the next on the ground, 
because the stream is its child. But man is 
not strictly just in his nomenclature; and I 
61 


LITTLE RIVERS 


conjecture that the little river, the last-born of 
the three, was the first to be christened Amper- 
sand, and then gave its name to its parent and 
grand-parent. It is such a crooked stream, so 
bent and curved and twisted upon itself, so 
fond of turning around unexpected corners and 
sweeping away in great circles from its direct 
course, that its first explorers christened it 
after the eccentric supernumerary of the alpha- 
bet which appears in the old spelling-books as 

— and 'per se, and. 

But in spite of this apparent subordination 
to the stream in the matter of a name, the 
mountain clearly asserts its natural authority. 
It stands up boldly; and not only its own lake, 
but at least three others, the Lower Saranac, 
Round Lake, and Lonesome Pond, lie at its 
foot and acknowledge its lordship. When the 
cloud is on its brow, they are dark. When the 
sunlight strikes it, they smile. Wherever you 
may go over the waters of these lakes you shall 
see Mount Ampersand looking down at you, 
and saying quietly, ‘‘This is my domain.” 

I never look at a mountain which asserts 
itself in this fashion without desiring to stand 
on the top of it. If one can reach the summit, 
one becomes a sharer in the dominion. The 
difficulties in the way only add to the zest of 
the victory. Every mountain is, rightly con- 
sidered, an invitation to climb. And as I was 
62 


AMPERSAND 


resting for a month one summer at Bartlett’s, 
Ampersand challenged me daily. 

Did you know Bartlett’s in its palmy time.^ 
It was the homeliest, quaintest, coziest place in 
the Adirondacks. Away back in the ante- 
helium days Virgil Bartlett had come into the 
woods, and built his house on the bank of the 
Saranac River, between the Upper Saranac and 
Round Lake. It was then the only dwelling 
within a circle of many miles. The deer and 
bear were in the majority. At night one could 
sometimes hear the scream of the panther or the 
howling of wolves. But soon the wilderness 
began to wear the traces of a conventional 
smile. The desert blossomed a little — if not as 
the rose, at least as the gilly-flower. Fields 
were cleared, gardens planted; half a dozen 
log cabins were scattered along the river; and 
the old house, having grown slowly and some- 
what irregularly for twenty years, came out, 
just before the time of which I write, in a modest 
coat of paint and a broad-brimmed piazza. 
But Virgil himself, the creator of the oasis — 
well known of hunters and fishermen, dreaded 
of lazy guides and quarrelsome lumbermen, — 
‘^Virge,” the irascible, kind-hearted, indefat- 
igable, was there no longer. He had made 
his last clearing, and fought his last fight; done 
his last favour to a friend, and thrown his last 
adversary out of the tavern door. His last 
63 


LITTLE RIVERS 


log had gone down the river. His camp-fire 
had burned out. Peace to his ashes. His 
wife, who had often played the part of Abigail 
toward travellers who had unconsciously in- 
curred the old man’s mistrust, now reigned in 
his stead; and there was great abundance of 
maple-syrup on every man’s flapjack. 

The charm of Bartlett’s for the angler was 
the stretch of rapid water in front of the house. 
The Saranac River, breaking from its first 
resting-place in the Upper Lake, plunged down 
through a great bed of rocks, making a chain 
of short falls and pools and rapids, about half 
a mile in length. Here, in the spring and early 
summer, the speckled trout — brightest and 
daintiest of all fish that swim — used to be found 
in great numbers. As the season advanced, 
they moved away into the deep water of the 
lakes. But there were always a few stragglers 
left, and I have taken them in the rapids at 
the very end of August. What could be more 
delightful than to spend an hour or two, in the 
early morning or evening of a hot day, in wad- 
ing this rushing stream, and casting the fly on 
its clear waters The wind blows softly down 
the narrow valley, and the trees nod from the 
rocks above you. The noise of the falls makes 
constant music in your ears. The river hurries 
past you, and yet it is never gone. 

The same foam-flakes seem to be always 
64 


AMPERSAND 


gliding downward, the same spray dashing over 
the stones, the same eddy coiling at the edge 
of the pool. Send your fly in under those cedar 
branches, where the water swirls around by 
that old log. Now draw it up toward the foam. 
There is a sudden gleam of dull gold in the white 
water. You strike too soon. Your line comes 
back to you. In a current like this, a fish will 
almost always hook himself. Try it again. 
This time he takes the fly fairly, and you have 
him. It is a good fish, and he makes the slender 
rod bend to the strain. He sulks for a moment 
as if uncertain what to do, and then with a 
rush darts into the swiftest part of the current. 
You can never stop him there. Let him go. 
Keep just enough pressure on him to hold the 
hook firm, and follow his troutship down the 
stream as if he were a salmon. He slides over 
a little fall, gleaming through the foam, and 
swings around in the next pool. Here you can 
manage him more easily; and after a few min- 
utes’ brilliant play, a few mad dashes for the 
current, he comes to the net, and your skilful 
guide lands him with a quick, steady sweep of 
the arm. The scales credit him with an even 
pound, and a better fish than this you will 
hardly take here in midsummer. 

‘‘On my word, master,” says the appreciative 
Venator, in Walton’s Angler, “this is a gallant 
trout; what shall we do with him?” And hon- 
65 


LITTLE RIVERS 


est Piscator replies: ‘‘Marry! e’en eat him to 
supper; we ’ll go to my hostess from whence 
we came; she told me, as I was going out of 
door, that my brother Peter, [and who is this 
but Romeyn of Keeseville?] a good angler and 
a cheerful companion, had sent word he would 
lodge there to-night, and bring a friend with 
him. My hostess has two beds, and I know you 
and I have the best ; we ’ll rejoice with my 
brother Peter and his friend, tell tales, or sing 
ballads, or make a catch, or find some harm- 
less sport to content us, and pass away a little 
time without offence to God or man.” 

Ampersand waited immovable while I passed 
many days in such innocent and healthful 
pleasures as these, until the right day came for 
the ascent. Cool, clean, and bright, the crystal 
morning promised a glorious noon, and the 
mountain almost seemed to beckon us to come 
up higher. The photographic camera and a 
trustworthy lunch were stowed away in the 
pack-basket. The backboard was adjusted at 
a comfortable angle in the stern seat of our 
little boat. The guide held the little craft 
steady while I stepped into my place; then he 
pushed out into the stream, and we went 
swiftly down toward Round Lake. 

A Saranac boat is one of the finest things that 
the skill of man has ever produced under the 
inspiration of the wilderness. It is a frail shell, 
66 


AMPERSAND 


so light that a guide can carry it on his shoulders 
with ease, but so dexterously fashioned that it 
rides the heaviest waves like a duck, and slips 
through the water as if by magic. You can 
travel in it along the shallowest rivers and 
across the broadest lakes, and make forty or 
fifty miles a day, if you have a good guide. 

Everything depends, in the Adirondacks, as 
in so many other regions of life, upon your guide. 
If he is selfish, or surly, or stupid, you will have 
a bad time. But if he is an Adirondacker of 
the best old-fashioned type, — ^now unhappily 
growing more rare from year to year, — you will 
find him an inimitable companion, honest, faith- 
ful, skilful and cheerful. He is as independent 
as a prince, and the gilded youths and finicking 
fine ladies who attempt to patronise him are 
apt to make but a sorry show before his solid 
and undisguised contempt. But deal with him 
man to man, and he will give you a friendly, 
loyal service which money cannot buy, and 
teach you secrets of woodcraft and lessons in 
plain, seH-reliant manhood more valuable than 
all the learning of the schools. Such a guide 
was mine, rejoicing in the Scriptural name of 
Hosea, but commonly called, in brevity and 
friendliness, “Hose.” 

As we entered Round Lake on this fair morn- 
ing, its surface was as smooth and shining as a 
mirror. It was too early yet for the tide of 
67 


LITTLE RIVERS 


travel which sends a score of boats up and down 
this thoroughfare every day; and from shore 
to shore the water was unruffled, except by a 
flock of sheldrakes which had been feeding near 
Plymouth Rock, and now went skittering off 
into Weller Bay with a motion between flying 
and swimming, leaving a long wake of foam 
behind them. 

At such a time as this you can see the real 
colour of these Adirondack lakes. It is not 
blue, as romantic writers so often describe it, 
nor green, like some of those wonderful Swiss 
lakes; although of course it reflects the colour 
of the trees along the shore; and when the wind 
stirs it, it gives back the hue of the sky, blue 
when it is clear, gray when the clouds are gather- 
ing, and sometimes as black as ink under the 
shadow of storm. But when it is still, the water 
itself is like that river which one of the poets 
has described as 

'^FUnving vnih a smooth brown current. 

And in this sheet of burnished bronze the 
mountains and islands were reflected perfectly, 
and the sun shone back from it, not in broken 
gleams or a wide lane of light, but like a single 
ball of Are, moving before us as we moved. 

But stop! What is that dark speck on the 
water, away down toward Turtle Point? It 
has just the shape and size of a deer’s head. 

68 


AMPERSAND 


It seems to move steadily out into the lake. 
There is a little ripple, like a wake, behind it. 
Hose turns to look at it, and then sends the 
boat darting in that direction with long, swift 
strokes. It is a moment of pleasant excitement, 
and we begin to conjecture whether the deer 
is a buck or a doe, and whose hounds have 
driven it in. But when Hose turns to look 
again, he slackens his stroke, and says: ‘T 
guess we needn’t to hurry; he won’t get away. 
It’s astonishin’ what a lot of fun a man can 
get in the course of a natural life a-chasin’ 
chumps of wood.” 

We landed on a sand beach at the mouth of 
a little stream, where a blazed tree marked 
the beginning of the Ampersand trail. This 
line through the forest was made years ago by 
that ardent sportsman and lover of the Adiron- 
dacks. Dr. W. W. Ely, of Rochester. Since 
that time it has been shortened and improved 
a little by other travellers, and also not a little 
blocked and confused by the lumbermen and 
the course of Nature. For when the lumber- 
men go into the woods, they cut roads in every 
direction, leading nowhither, and the unwary 
wanderer is thereby led aside from the right 
way, and entangled in the undergrowth. And 
as for Nature, she is entirely opposed to con- 
tinuance of paths through her forest. She 
covers them with fallen leaves, and hides them 
69 


LITTLE RIVERS 


with thick bushes. She drops great trees across 
them, and blots them out with windfalls. But 
the blazed line — sl succession of broad axe- 
marks on the trunks of the trees, just high 
enough to catch the eye on a level — cannot be 
so easily obliterated, and this, after all, is the 
safest guide through the woods. 

Our trail led us at first through a natural 
meadow, overgrown with waist-high grass, and 
very spongy to the tread. Hornet-haunted also 
was this meadow, and therefore no place for 
idle dalliance or unwary digression, for the 
sting of the hornet is one of the saddest and 
most humiliating surprises of this mortal life. 

Then through a tangle of old wood-roads my 
guide led me safely, and we struck one of the 
long ridges which slope gently from the lake 
to the base of the mountain. Here walking 
was comparatively easy, for in the hard-wood 
timber there is little underbrush. The massive 
trunks seemed like pillars set to uphold the level 
roof of green. Great yellow birches, shaggy 
with age, stretched their knotted arms high 
above us; sugar-maples stood up straight and 
proud under their leafy crowns; and smooth 
beeches — ^the most polished and park-like of all 
the forest trees — offered opportunities for the 
carving of lovers’ names in a place where few 
lovers ever come. 

The woods were quiet. It seemed as if aU 
70 


AMPERSAND 


living creatures had deserted them. Indeed, 
if you have spent much time in our Northern 
forests, you must have often wondered at the 
sparseness of life, and felt a sense of pity for 
the apparent loneliness of the squirrel that chat- 
ters at you as you pass, or the little bird that 
hops noiselessly about in the thickets. The 
midsummer noontide is an especially silent 
time. The deer are asleep in some wild meadow. 
The partridge has gathered her brood for their 
midday nap. The squirrels are perhaps count- 
ing over their store of nuts in a hollow tree, 
and the hermit-thrush spares his voice until 
evening. The woods are close — ^not cool and 
fragrant as the foolish romances describe them 
— ^but warm and still; for the breeze which sweeps 
across the hilltop and ruflSes the lake does not 
penetrate into these shady recesses, and there- 
fore all the inhabitants take the noontide as 
their hour of rest. Only the big woodpecker — 
he of the scarlet head and mighty bill — ^is in- 
defatigable, and somewhere unseen is ‘Happing 
the hollow beech-tree,” while a wakeful little 
bird, — guess it is the black-throated green 
warbler, — ^prolongs his dreamy, listless ditty, — 
He-de-terit-sca, — He-de-us-wait, 

After about an hour of easy walking, our 
trail began to ascend more sharply. We passed 
over the shoulder of a ridge and around the edge 
of a fire-slash, and then we had the mountain 
71 


LITTLE RIVERS 


fairly before us. Not that we could see anything 
of it, for the woods still shut us in, but the path 
became very steep, and we knew that it was a 
straight climb ; not up and down and round about 
did this most uncompromising trail proceed, 
but right up, in a direct line for the summit. 

Now this side of Ampersand is steeper than 
any Gothic roof I have ever seen, and withal 
very much encumbered with rocks and ledges 
and fallen trees. There were places where we 
had to haul ourselves up by roots and branches, 
and places where we had to go down on our 
hands and knees to crawl under logs. It was 
breathless work, but not at all dangerous or 
difficult. Every step forward was also a step 
upward; and as we stopped to rest for a moment, 
we could see already glimpses of the lake be- 
low us. But at these I did not much care to 
look, for I think it is a pity to spoil the surprise 
of a grand view by taking little snatches of it 
beforehand. It is better to keep one’s face set 
to the mountain, and then, coming out from 
the dark forest upon the very summit, feel the 
splendour of the outlook flash upon one like a 
revelation. 

The character of the woods through which 
we were now passing was entirely different 
from those of the lower levels. On these steep 
places the birch and maple will not grow, or at 
least they occur but sparsely. The higher 
72 


AMPERSAND 


slopes and sharp ridges of the mountains are 
always covered with soft-wood timber. Spruce 
and hemlock and balsam strike their roots 
among the rocks, and find a hidden nourish- 
ment. They stand close together; thickets of 
small trees spring up among the large ones; 
from year to year the great trunks are falling 
one across another, and the undergrowth is 
thickening around them, until a spruce forest 
seems to be almost impassable. The constant 
rain of needles and the crumbling of the fallen 
trees form a rich, brown mould, into which the 
foot sinks noiselessly. Wonderful beds of moss, 
many feet in thickness, and softer than feathers, 
cover the rocks and roots. There are shadows 
never broken by the sun, and dark, cool springs 
of icy water hidden away in the crevices. You 
feel a sense of antiquity here which you can 
never feel among the maples and birches. 
Longfellow was right when he filled his forest 
primeval with ‘^murmuring pines and hemlocks.” 

The higher one climbs, the darker and gloomier 
and more rugged the vegetation becomes. The 
pine-trees soon cease to follow you; the hemlocks 
disappear, and the balsams can go no farther. 
Only the hardy spruce keeps on bravely, rough 
and stunted, with branches matted together 
and pressed down flat by the weight of the 
winter’s snow, until finally, somewhere about 
the level of four thousand feet above the sea, 
73 


LITTLE EIVERS 


even this bold climber gives out, and the weather- 
beaten rocks of the summit are clad only with 
mosses and Alpine plants. 

Thus it is with mountains, as perhaps with 
men, a mark of superior dignity to be naturally 
bald. 

Ampersand, falling short by a thousand feet 
of the needful height, cannot claim this dis- 
tinction. But what Nature has denied, human 
labour has supplied. Under the direction of 
the Adirondack Survey, some years ago, several 
acres of trees were cut from the summit; and 
when we emerged, after the last sharp scramble, 
upon the very crest of the mountain, we were 
not shut in by a dense thicket, but stood upon 
a bare ridge of granite in the centre of a ragged 
clearing. 

I shut my eyes for a moment, drew a few 
long breaths of the glorious breeze, and then 
looked out upon a wonder and a delight beyond 
description. 

A soft, dazzling splendour filled the air. 
Snowy banks and drifts of cloud were floating 
slowly over a wide and wondrous land. Vast 
sweeps of forest, shining waters, mountains 
near and far, the deepest green and the palest 
blue, changing colours and glancing lights, and 
all so silent, so strange, so far away, that it 
seemed like the landscape of a dream. One 
almost feared to speak, lest it should vanish. 

74 


AMPERSAND 


Right below us the Lower Saranac and Lone- 
some Pond, Round Lake and the Weller Ponds, 
were spread out like a map. Every point and 
island was clearly marked. We could follow 
the course of the Saranac River in all its curves 
and windings, and see the white tents of the 
haymakers on the wild meadows. Far away 
to the northeast stretched the level fields of 
Bloomingdale. But westward all was unbroken 
wilderness, a great sea of woods as far as the 
eye could reach. And how far it can reach 
from a height like this ! What a revelation of 
the power of sight ! That faint blue outline 
far in the north was Lyon Mountain, nearly 
thirty miles away as the crow flies. Those silver 
gleams a little nearer were the waters of St. 
Regis. The Upper Saranac was displayed in 
all its length and breadth, and beyond it the 
innumerable waters of Fish Creek were tangled 
among the dark woods. The long ranges of 
the hills about the Jordan bounded the western 
horizon, and on the southwest Big Tupper Lake 
was sleeping at the base of Mount Morris. 
Looking past the peak of Stony Creek Moun- 
tain, which rose sharp and distinct in a line 
with Ampersand, we could trace the path of 
the Raquette River from the distant waters of 
Long Lake down through its far-stretched val- 
ley, and catch here and there a silvery link of 
its current. 


75 


LITTLE RIVERS 


But when we turned to the south and east, 
how wonderful and how different was the view ! 
Here was no widespread and smiling landscape 
with gleams of silver scattered through it, and 
soft blue haze resting upon its fading verge, 
but a wild land of mountains, stern, rugged, 
tumultuous, rising one beyond another like the 
waves of a stormy ocean, — Ossa piled upon 
Pelion, — ^McIntyre’s sharp peak, and the ragged 
crest of the Gothics, and, above all, Marcy’s 
dome-like head, raised just far enough above 
the others to assert his royal right as monarch 
of the Adirondacks. 

But grandest of all, as seen from this height, 
was Mount Seward , — a solenm giant of a moun- 
tain, standing apart from the others, and look- 
ing us full in the face. He was clothed from 
base to summit in a dark, unbroken robe of 
forest. Ou-kor-lah, the Indians called him — 
the Great Eye; and he seemed almost to frown 
upon us in defiance. At his feet, so straight 
below us that it seemed almost as if we could 
cast a stone into it, lay the wildest and most 
beautiful of all the Adirondack waters — ^Am- 
persand Lake. 

On its shore, some five-and-twenty years ago, 
the now almost forgotten Adirondack Club had 
their shanty — ^the successor of “the Philosophers’ 
Camp” on Follensbee Pond. Agassiz, Apple- 
ton, Norton, Emerson, Lowell, Hoar, Gray, 
76 


AMPERSAND 


John Holmes, and Stillman, were among the 
company who made their resting-place under 
the shadow of Mount Seward. They had 
bought a tract of forest land completely en- 
circling the pond, cut a rough road to it through 
the woods, and built a comfortable log cabin, 
to which they purposed to return summer after 
summer. But the civil war broke out, with all 
its terrible excitement and confusion of hurry- 
ing hosts: the club existed but for two years, 
and the little house in the wilderness was aban- 
doned. In 1878, when I spent three weeks at 
Ampersand, the cabin was in ruins, and sur- 
rounded by an almost impenetrable growth of 
bushes. The only philosophers to be seen were 
a family of what the guides quaintly call “quill 
pigs.” The roof had fallen to the ground; 
raspberry-bushes thrust themselves through the 
yawning crevices between the logs; and in front 
of the sunken door-sill lay a rusty, broken iron 
stove, like a dismantled altar on which the 
fire had gone out forever. 

After we had feasted upon the view as long 
as we dared, counted the lakes and streams, 
and found that we could see without a glass 
more than thirty, and recalled the memories of 
“good times” which came to us from almost 
every point of the compass, we unpacked the 
camera, and proceeded to take some pictures. 

If you are a photographer, and have any- 
77 


LITTLE RIVERS 


thing of the amateur’s passion for your art, 
you will appreciate my pleasure and my anxiety. 
Never before, so far as I knew, had a camera 
been set up on Ampersand. I had but eight 
plates with me. The views were all very dis- 
tant and all at a downward angle. The power 
of the light at this elevation was an unknown 
quantity. And the wind was sweeping vigor- 
ously across the open summit of the mountain. 
I put in my smallest stop, and prepared for 
short exposures. 

My instrument was a thing called a Touro- 
graph, which differs from most other cameras 
in having the plate-holder on top of the box. 
The plates are dropped into a groove below, 
and then moved into focus, after which the cap 
is removed and the exposure made. 

I set my instrument for Ampersand Pond, 
sighted the picture through the ground glass, 
and measured the focus. Then I waited for a 
quiet moment, dropped the plate, moved it 
carefully forward to the proper mark, and went 
around to take off the cap. I found that I 
already had it in my hand, and the plate had been 
exposed for about thirty seconds with a sliding 
focus / 

I expostulated with myself. I said: ‘^You are 
excited; you are stupid; you are unworthy of 
the name of photographer. Light-writer ! You 
ought to write with a whitewash-brush !” The 
78 


AMPERSAND 


reproof was effectual, and from that moment 
all went well. The plates dropped smoothly, 
the camera was steady, the exposure was cor- 
rect. Six good pictures were made, to recall, 
so far as black and white could do it, the delights 
of that day. 

It has been my good luck to climb many of 
the peaks of the Adirondacks — ^Dix, the Dial, 
Hurricane, the Giant of the Valley, Marcy, 
and Whiteface — ^but I do not think the outlook 
from any of them is so wonderful and lovely as 
that from little Ampersand; and I reckon among 
my most valuable chattels the plates of glass 
on which the sun has traced for me (who can- 
not draw) the outlines of that loveliest land- 
scape. 

The downward journey was swift. We halted 
for an hour or two beside a trickling spring, a 
few rods below the summit, to eat our lunch. 
Then, jumping, running, and sometimes sliding, 
we made the descent, passed in safety by the 
dreaded lair of the hornet, and reached Bart- 
lett’s as the fragrance of the evening pancake 
was softly diffused through the twilight. Mark 
that day. Memory, with a double star in your 
catalogue ! 

1885. 


79 



A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


Scotland is the home of romance because it is the home of Scott, Burns, 
Black, Macdonald, Stevenson, and Barrie — and of thousands of men like 
that old Highlander in kilts on the tow-'palh, who loves what they have 
written. 1 would wager he has a copy of Bums in his sporran, and has 
quoted him half a dozen times to the grim Celt who is walking with him. 
Those old boys don't read for excitement or knowledge, but because they 
love their land and their people and their religion — and their great writers 
simply express their emotions for them in words they can understand. You 
and I come over here, with thousands of our countrymen, to borrow their 
emotions ." — ^Robebt Bridges: Overheard in Arcady, 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


ly/T Y friend the Triumphant Democrat, fiercest 
of radicals and kindest of men, expresses 
his scorn for monarchical institutions (and his in- 
vincible love for his native Scotland) by tenant- 
ing, summer after summer, a famous castle 
among the heathery Highlands. There he pro- 
claims the most uncompromising Americanism 
in a speech that grows more broadly Scotch 
with every week of his emancipation from the 
influence of the clipped, commercial accent of 
New York, and casts contempt on feudalism by 
playing the part of lord of the manor to such a 
perfection of high-handed beneficence that the 
people of the glen are all become his clansmen, 
and his gentle lady would be the patron saint 
of the district — ^if the republican theology of 
Scotland could only admit saints among the 
elect. 

Every year he sends trophies of game to his 
friends across the sea — ^birds that are as tooth- 
some and wild-flavoured as if they had not been 
hatched under the tyranny of the game-laws. 
He has a pleasant trick of making them grateful 
to the imagination as well as to the palate by 
packing them in heather. I’ll warrant that 
83 


LITTLE RIVERS 


Aaron’s rod bore no bonnier blossoms than 
these stiff little bushes — and none more magical. 
For every time I take up a handful of them 
they transport me to the Highlands, and send 
me tramping once more, with knapsack and 
fishing-rod, over the braes and down the burns. 

I 

BELL-HEATHER 

Some of my happiest meanderings in Scotland 
have been taken under the lead of a book. In- 
deed, for travel in a strange country there can 
be no better courier. Not a guide-book, I 
mean, but a real book, and, by preference, a 
novel. 

Fiction, like wine, tastes best in the place 
where it was grown. And the scenery of a 
foreign land (including architecture, which is 
artificial landscape) becomes less dreamlike and 
unreal to our perception when we people it 
with familiar characters from our favourite 
novels. Even on a first journey we feel our- 
selves among old friends. Thus to read Ro- 
mola in Florence, and Les Miserables in Paris, 
and Lorna Doone on Exmoor, and The Heart 
of Midlothian in Edinburgh, and David Balfour 
in the Pass of Glencoe, and The Pirate in the 
Shetland Isles, is to get a new sense of the pos- 
sibilities of life. All these things have I done 
84 


A HANDFUL OP HEATHER 


with much inward contentment; and other things 
of like quality have I yet in store; as, for ex- 
ample, the conjunction of The Bonnie Brier- 
Bush with Drumtochty, and The Little Minister 
with Thrums, and The Raiders with Galloway. 
But I never expect to pass pleasanter days 
than those I spent with William Black’s A 
Princess of Thule among the Hebrides. 

For then, to begin with, I was young; which 
is an unearned increment of delight sure to be 
confiscated by the envious years and never re- 
gained. But even youth itself was not to be 
compared with the exquisite felicity of being 
deeply and desperately in love with Sheila, the 
clear-eyed heroine of that charming book. In 
this innocent passion my gray-haired comrades, 
Howard Crosby, the Chancellor of the Univer- 
sity of New York, and my father, an ex-Moder- 
ator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, 
were ardent but generous rivals. 

How great is the joy and how fascinating the 
pursuit of such an ethereal affection ! It en- 
larges the heart without embarrassing the con- 
science. It is a cup of pure gladness with no 
bitterness in its dregs. It spends the present 
moment with a free hand, and yet leaves no 
undesirable mortgage upon the future. King 
Arthur, the founder of the Round Table, ex- 
pressed a conviction, according to Tennyson, 
that the most important element in a young 
85 


LITTLE RIVERS 


knight’s education is ‘Hhe maiden passion for a 
maid.” Surely the safest form in which this 
course in the curriculum may be taken is by 
falling in love with a girl in a book. It is the 
only affair of the kind into which a young 
fellow can enter without responsibility, and out 
of which he can always emerge, when necessary, 
without discredit. And as for the old fellow 
who still keeps up this education of the heart, 
and worships his heroine with the ardour of a 
John Ridd and the fidelity of a Henry Esmond, 
I maintain that he is exempt from all the penal- 
ties of declining years. The man who can love 
a girl in a book may be old, but never aged. 

So we sailed, lovers all three, among the 
Western Isles, and whatever ship it was that 
carried us, her figurehead was always the Prin- 
cess Sheila. Along the ruffled blue waters of 
the sounds and lochs that wind among the 
roots of unpronounceable mountains, and past 
the dark hills of Skye, and through the unnum- 
bered flocks of craggy islets, where the sea- 
birds nest, the spell of the sweet Highland maid 
drew us, and we were pilgrims to the Ultima 
Thule where she lived and reigned. 

The Lewis, with its tail-piece, the Harris, is 
quite a sizable island to be appended to such a 
country as Scotland. It is a number of miles 
long, and another number of miles wide, and it 
has a number of thousand inhabitants — ^I should 
86 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


say as many as three-quarters of an inhabitant 
to the square mile — ^and the conditions of agri- 
culture and the fisheries are extremely interest- 
ing and quarrelsome. All these I duly studied 
at the time, and reported in a series of intoler- 
ably dull letters to the newspaper which sup- 
plied a financial basis for my sentimental jour- 
ney. They are full of information; but I have 
been amused to note, after these many years, 
how wide they steer of the true motive and in- 
terest of the excursion. There is not even a 
hint of Sheila in any of them. Youth, after all, 
is a shamefaced and secretive season; like the 
fringed polygala, it hides its real blossom un- 
derground. 

It was Sheila’s dark-blue dress and sailor hat 
with the white feather that we looked for as 
we loafed through the streets of Stornoway, 
that quaint metropolis of the herring-trade, 
where strings of fish alternated with boxes of 
flowers in the windows, and handfuls of fish 
were spread upon the roofs to dry just as the 
sliced apples are exposed upon the kitchen- 
sheds of New England in September, and dark- , 
haired women were carrying great creels of fish 
on their shoulders, and groups of sunburned 
men were smoking among the fishing-boats on 
the beach and talking about fish, and sea-gulls 
were floating over the houses with their heads 
turning from side to side and their bright eyes 
87 


LITTLE RIVERS 


peering everywhere for unconsidered trifles of 
fish, and the whole atmosphere of the place, 
physical, mental, and moral, was pervaded with 
fish. It was Sheila’s soft, sing-song Highland 
speech that we heard through the long, luminous 
twilight in the pauses of that friendly chat on 
the balcony of the little inn where a good for- 
tune brought us acquainted with Sam Bough, 
the mellow Edinburgh painter. It was Sheila’s 
low sweet brow, and long black eyelashes, and 
tender blue eyes, that we saw before us as we 
loitered over the open moorland, a far-rolling 
sea of brown billows, reddened with patches of 
bell-heather, and brightened here and there with 
little lakes lying wide open to the sky. And 
were not these peat-cutters, with the big baskets 
on their backs, walking in silhouette along the 
ridges, the people that Sheila loved and tried 
to help; and were not these crofters’ cottages 
with thatched roofs, like beehives, blending al- 
most imperceptibly with the landscape, the 
dwellings into which she planned to introduce 
the luxury of windows; and were not these 
Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones 
of a vanished religion, the roofless temple from 
which the Druids paid their westernmost adora- 
tion to the setting sun as he sank into the At- 
lantic — ^was not this the place where Sheila 
picked the bunch of wild flowers and gave it to 
her lover? There is nothing in history, I am 
88 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


sure, half so real to us as some of the things in 
fiction. The influence of an event upon our 
character is little affected by considerations as 
to whether or not it ever happened. 

There were three churches in Stornoway, all 
Presbyterian, of course, and therefore full of 
pious emulation. The idea of securing an 
American preacher for an August Sabbath 
seemed to fall upon them simultaneously, and 
to offer the prospect of novelty without too much 
danger. The brethren of the U. P. congrega- 
tion, being a trifle more gleg than the others, 
arrived first at the inn, and secured the promise 
of a morning sermon from Chancellor Howard 
Crosby. The session of the Free Kirk came in 
a body a little later, and to them my father 
pledged himself for the evening sermon. The 
senior elder of the Established Kirk, a snuff- 
taking man and very deliberate, was the last 
to appear, and to his request for an afternoon 
sermon there was nothing left to offer but the 
services of the young probationer in theology. 
I could see that it struck him as a perilous ad- 
venture. Questions about ‘Hhe fundamentals” 
glinted in his watery eye. He crossed and un- 
crossed his legs with solemnity, and blew his 
nose so frequently in a huge red silk handker- 
chief that it seemed like a signal of danger. At 
last he unburdened himself of his hesitations. 

‘‘Ah ’m not saying that the young man will 
89 


LITTLE RIVERS 


not be orthodox — ^ahem ! But ye know, sir, in 
the Kirk, we are not using hymns, but just the 
pure Psawms of Daffit, in the meetrical fairsion. 
And ye know, sir, they are ferry tifficult in the 
reating, whatefer, for a young man, and one 
that iss a stranger. And if his father will just 
be coming with him in the pulpit, to see that 
nothing iss said amiss, that will be Jerry comfort- 
ing to the congregation.'^^ 

So the dear governor swallowed his laughter 
gravely and went surety for his son. They ap- 
peared together in the church, a barnlike edifice, 
with great galleries half-way between the floor 
and the roof. Still higher up, the pulpit stuck 
like a swallow’s nest against the wall. The two 
ministers climbed the precipitous stair and 
found themselves in a box so narrow that one 
must stand perforce, while the other sat upon 
the only seat. In this ‘‘ride and tie” fashion 
they went through the service. When it was 
time to preach, the young man dropped the 
doctrines as discreetly as possible upon the up- 
turned countenances beneath him. I have for- 
gotten now what it was all about, but there 
was a quotation from the Song of Solomon, 
ending with “Sweet is thy voice, and thy coun- 
tenance is comely.” And when it came to 
that, the probationer’s eyes (if the truth must 
be told) went searching through that sea of 
faces for one that should be familiar to his 
90 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


heart, and to which he might make a personal 
application of the Scripture passage — even the 
face of Sheila. 

There are rivers in the Lewis, at least two of 

them, and on one of these we had the offer of a 
rod for a day’s fishing. Accordingly we cast 
lots, and the lot fell upon the youngest, and I 
went forth with a tall, red-legged gillie, to try 
for my first salmon. The Whitewater came 
singing down out of the moorland into a rocky 
valley, and there was a merry curl of air on 
the pools, and the silver fish were leaping from 
the stream. The gillie handled the big rod as 
if it had been a fairy’s wand, but to me it was 
like a giant’s spear. It was a very different 
affair from fishing with five ounces of split bam- 
boo on a Long Island trout-pond. The mon- 
strous fly, like an awkward bird, went fluttering 
everywhere but in the right direction. It was 
the mercy of Providence that preserved the 
gillie’s eyes. 

But he was very patient and forbearing, 
leading me on from one pool to another, as I 
spoiled the water and snatched the hook out 
of the mouth of rising fish, until at last we found 
a salmon that knew even less about the niceties 
of salmon-fishing than I did. He seized the 
fly firmly, before I could pull it away, and 

then, in a moment, I found myself attached to 
a creature with the strength of a whale and the 

91 


LITTLE RIVERS 


agility of a flying-fish. He led me rushing up 
and down the bank like a madman. He played 
on the surface like a whirlwind, and sulked at 
the bottom like a stone. He meditated, with 
ominous delay, in the middle of the deepest 
pool, and then, darting across the river, flung 
himself clean out of water and landed far upon 
the green turf of the opposite shore. My heart 
melted like a snowflake in the sea, and I thought 
that I had lost him forever. But he rolled 
quietly back into the water with the hook still 
set in his nose. A few minutes afterwards I 
brought him within reach of the gaff, and my 
first salmon was glittering on the grass beside 
me. 

Then I remembered that William Black had 
described this very fish in A Princess of Thule, 
I pulled the book from my pocket, and, lighting 
a pipe, sat down to read that delightful chapter 
over again. The breeze played softly down the 
valley. The warm sunlight was filled with the 
musical hum of insects and the murmur of fall- 
ing waters. I thought how much pleasanter it 
would have been to learn salmon-fishing, as 
Black’s hero did, from the Maid of Borva, than 
from a red-headed gillie. But, then, his sal- 
mon, after leaping across the stream, got away; 
whereas mine was safe. A man cannot have 
everything in this world. I picked a spray of 
rosy bell-heather from the bank of the river, 
92 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


and pressed it between the leaves of the book 
in memory of Sheila. 


II 

COMMON HEATHER 

It is not half as far from Albany to Aberdeen 
as it is from New York to London. In fact, 
I venture to say that an American on foot will 
find himself less a foreigner in Scotland than in 
any other country in the Old World. There is 
something warm and hospitable— if he knew 
the language well enough he would call it couthy 
— ^in the greeting that he gets from the shepherd 
on the moor, and the conversation that he holds 
with the farmer’s wife in the stone cottage, 
where he stops to ask for a drink of milk and 
a bit of oat-cake. He feels that there must 
be a drop of Scotch somewhere in his mingled 
blood, or at least that the texture of his thought 
and feelings has been partly woven on a Scot- 
tish loom — perhaps the Shorter Catechism, or 
Robert Burns’s poems, or the romances of Sir 
Walter Scott. At all events, he is among a 
kindred and comprehending people. They do 
not speak English in the same way that he does 
— ^through the nose — ^but they think very much 
more in his mental dialect than the English do. 
They are independent and wide awake, curious 
and full of personal interest. The wayside 
93 


LITTLE RIVERS 


mind in Inverness or Perth runs more to muscle 
and less to fat, has more active vanity and less 
passive pride, is more inquisitive and excitable 
and sympathetic — ^in short, to use a symbolist’s 
description, it is more apt to be red-headed — 
than in Surrey or Somerset. Scotchmen ask 
more questions about America, but fewer fool- 
ish ones. You will never hear them inquiring 
whether there is any good bear-hunting in the 
neighbourhood of Boston, or whether Shake- 
speare is much read in the States. They have a 
healthy respect for our institutions, and have 
quite forgiven (if, indeed, they ever resented) 
that little affair in 1776. They are all bom 
Liberals. When a Scotchman says he is a 
Conservative, it only means that he is a Lib- 
eral with hesitations. 

And yet in North Britain the American pe- 
destrian will not find that amused and some- 
what condescending toleration for his peculiari- 
ties, that placid willingness to make the best 
of all his vagaries of speech and conduct, that 
he finds in South Britain. In an English town 
you may do pretty much what you like on a 
Sunday, even to the extent of wearing a billy- 
cock hat to church, and people will put up with 
it from a countryman of Buffalo Bill and the 
Wild West Show. But in a Scotch village, if 
you whistle in the street on a Lord’s Day, 
though it be a Moody and Sankey tune, you 
94 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


will be likely to get, as I did, an admonition 
from some long-legged, grizzled elder: 

‘‘Young man, do ye no ken it ’s the Sawbath 
Day?’’ 

I recognised the reproof of the righteous, an 
excellent oil which doth not break the head, and 
took it gratefully at the old man’s hands. For 
did it not prdve that he regarded me as a man 
and a brother, a creature capable of being civil- 
ised and saved? 

It was in the gray town of Dingwall that I 
had this bit of pleasant correction, as I was on 
the way to a fishing tramp through Suther- 
landshire. This northwest corner of Great 
Britain is the best place in the whole island for 
a modest and impecunious angler. There are, 
or there were a few years ago, wild lochs and 
streams which are still practically free, and a 
man who is content with small things can pick 
up some very pretty sport from the highland 
inns, and make a good basket of memorable 
experiences every week. 

The inn at Lairg, overlooking the narrow 
waters of Loch Shin, was embowered in honey- 
suckles, and full of creature comfort. But 
there were too many other men with rods there 
to suit my taste. “The feesh in this loch,” 
said the boatman, “iss not so numerous ass the 
feeshermen, but more wise. There iss not one 
of them that hass not felt the hook, and they 
95 


LITTLE EIVERS 

know ferry well what side of the fly has the 
forkit tail.” 

At Altnaharra, in the shadow of Ben Clebrig, 
there was a cozy little house with good fare, and 
abundant trout-fishing in Loch Naver and Loch 
Meadie. It was there that I fell in with a wan- 
dering pearl-peddler who gathered his wares 
from the mussels in the moorland streams. 
They were not of the finest quality, these Scotch 
pearls, but they had pretty, changeable colours 
of pink and blue upon them, like the iridescent 
light that plays over the heather in the long 
northern evenings. I thought it must be a hard 
life for the man, wading day after day in the 
ice-cold water, and groping among the coggly, 
sliddery stones for the shellfish, and cracking 
open perhaps a thousand before he could find 
one pearl. ‘‘Oh, yess,” said he, “and it iss not 
an easy life, and I am not saying that it will be 
so warm and dry ass liffing in a rich house. 
But it iss the life that I am fit for, and I hef 
my own time and my thoughts to myseF, and 
that is a ferry goot thing; and then, sir, I haf 
found the Pearl of Great Price, and I think 
upon that day and night.” 

Under the black, shattered peaks of Ben 
Laoghal, where I saw an eagle poising day after 
day as if some invisible centripetal force bound 
him forever to that small circle of air, there 
was a loch with plenty of brown trout and a 
96 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


few salmo ferox ; and down at Tongue there 
was a little river where the sea-trout sometimes 
come up with the tide. 

Here I found myself upon the north coast, 
and took the road eastward between the moun- 
tains and the sea. It was a beautiful region of 
desolation. There were rocky glens cutting 
across the road, and occasionally a brawling 
stream ran down to the salt water, breaking 
the line of cliffs with a little bay and a half- 
moon of yellow sand. The heather covered all 
the hills. There were no trees, and but few 
houses. The chief signs of human labour were 
the rounded piles of peat, and the square cut- 
tings in the moor marking the places where the 
subterranean wood-choppers had gathered their 
harvests. The long straths were once culti- 
vated, and every patch of arable land had its 
group of cottages full of children. The human 
harvest has always been the richest and most 
abundant that is raised in the Highlands; but 
unfortunately the supply exceeded the demand; 
and so the crofters were evicted, and great 
flocks of sheep were put in possession of the 
land; and now the sheep-pastures have been 
changed into deer-forests; and far and wide 
along the valleys and across the hills there is 
not a trace of habitation, except the heaps of 
stones and the clumps of straggling bushes 
which mark the sites of lost homes. But what 
97 


LITTLE RIVERS 


is one country’s loss is another country’s gain. 
Canada and the United States are infinitely the 
richer for the tough, strong, fearless, honest 
men that were dispersed from these lonely 
straths to make new homes across the sea. 

It was after sundown when I reached the 
straggling village of Melvich, and the long day’s 
journey had left me weary. But the inn, with 
its red-curtained windows, looked bright and 
reassuring. Thoughts of dinner and a good bed 
comforted my spirit — ^prematurely. For the 
inn was full. There were but five bedrooms 
and two parlours. The gentlemen who had the 
neighbouring shootings occupied three bedrooms 
and a parlour; the other two bedrooms had just 
been taken by the English fishermen who had 
passed me in the road an hour ago in the mail- 
coach (oh ! why had I not suspected that treach- 
erous vehicle.^); and the landlord and his wife 
assured me, with equal firmness and sympathy, 
that there was not another cot or pair of blankets 
in the house. I believed them, and was sink- 
ing into despair when Sandy M’Kaye appeared 
on the scene as my angel of deliverance. 

Sandy was a small, withered, wiry man, 
dressed in rusty gray, with an immense white 
collar thrusting out its points on either side of 
his chin, and a black stock climbing over the 
top of it. I guessed from his speech that he 
had once lived in the lowlands. He had hoped 
98 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


to be engaged as a gillie by the shooting party, 
but had been disappointed. He had wanted 
to be taken by the English fishermen, but an- 
other and younger man had stepped in before 
him. Now Sandy saw in me his Predestinated 
Opportunity, and had no idea of letting it post 
up the road that night to the next village. He 
cleared his throat respectfully and cut into the 
conversation. 

‘‘Ah ’m thinkin’ the gentleman micht find a 
coomfortaible lodgin’ wi’ the weedow Mac- 
phairson a wee bittie doon the road. Her doch- 
ter is awa’ in Ameriky, an’ the room is a verra 
fine room, an’ it is a peety to hae it stannin’ 
idle, an’ ye wudna mind the few steps to and 
fro tae yir meals here, sir, wud ye.^ An’ if ye 
’ill gang wi’ me efter dinner, ’a ’ll be prood to 
shoo ye the hoose.” 

So, after a good dinner with the English fish- 
ermen, Sandy piloted me down the road through 
the thickening dusk. I remember a hoodie 
crow flew close behind us with a choking, 
ghostly cough that startled me. The Mac- 
pherson cottage was a snug little house of stone, 
with fuchsias and roses growing in the front 
yard: and the widow was a douce old lady, 
with a face like a winter apple in the month of 
April, wrinkled, but still rosy. She was a little 
doubtful about entertaining strangers, but when 
she heard I was from America she opened the 
99 


LITTLE RIVERS 


doors of her house and her heart. And when, 
by a subtle cross examination that would have 
been a credit to the wife of a Connecticut 
deacon, she discovered the fact that her lodger 
was a minister, she did two things, with equal 
and immediate fervour; she brought out the 
big Bible and asked him to conduct evening 
worship, and she produced a bottle of old Glen- 
livet and begged him to guard against takkin’ 
cauld by takkin’ a glass of speerits.” 

It was a very pleasant fortnight at Melvich. 
Mistress Macpherson was so motherly that 
‘‘takkin’ cauld” was reduced to a permanent 
impossibility. The other men at the inn proved 
to be very companionable fellows, quite different 
from the monsters of insolence that my anger 
had imagined in the moment of disappointment. 
The shooting party kept the table abundantly 
supplied with grouse and hares and highland 
venison; and there was a piper to march up and 
down before the window and play while we 
ate dinner — a very complimentary and dis- 
quieting performance. But there are many 
occasions in life when pride can be entertained 
only at the expense of comfort. 

Of course Sandy was my gillie. It was a fine 
sight to see him exhibiting the tiny American 
trout-rod, tied with silk ribbons in its delicate 
case, to the other gillies and exulting over them. 
Every morning he would lead me away through 
100 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


the heather to some lonely loch on the shoulders 
of the hills, from which we could look down 
upon the Northern Sea and the blue Orkney 
Isles far away across the Pentland Firth. 
Sometimes we would find a loch with a boat on 
it, and drift up and down, casting along the 
shores. Sometimes, in spite of Sandy’s con- 
fident predictions, no boat could be found, and 
then I must put on the Mackintosh trousers 
and wade out over my hips into the water, and 
circumambulate the pond, throwing the flies 
as far as possible toward the middle, and feeling 
my way carefully along the bottom with the 
long net-handle, while Sandy danced on the 
bank in an agony of apprehension lest his Pre- 
destinated Opportunity should step into a deep 
hole and be drowned. It was a curious fact in 
natural history that on the lochs with boats 
the trout were in the shallow water, but in the 
boatless lochs they were away out in the depths. 
‘‘Juist the total depraivity o’ troots,” said 
Sandy, ‘"an’ terrible fateegin’.” 

Sandy had an aversion to commit himself to 
definite statements on any subject not the- 
ological. If you asked him how long the morn- 
ing’s tramp would be, it was “no verra long, 
juist a bit ayant the hull yonner.” And if, at 
the end of the seventh mile, you complained 
that it was much too far, he would never do 
more than admit that “it micht be shorter.” 

101 


LITTLE RIVERS 


If you called him to rejoice over a trout that 
weighed close upon two pounds, he allowed 
that it was ‘‘no bad — ^but there’s bigger anes i’ 
the loch gin we cud but wile them oot.” And 
at lunch-time, when we turned out a full basket 
of shining fish on the heather, the most that he 
would say, while his eyes snapped with joy and 
pride, was, “ Aweel, we canna complain, the day.” 

Then we would gather an armful of dried 
heather-stems for kindling, and dig out a few 
roots and crooked limbs of the long-vanished 
forest from the dry, brown, peaty soil, and make 
our campfire of prehistoric wood — just for the 
pleasant, homelike look of the blaze — ^and sit 
down beside it to eat our lunch. Heat is the 
least of the benefits that man gets from fire. 
It is the sign of cheerfulness and good comrade- 
ship. I would not willingly satisfy my hunger, 
even in a summer nooning, without a little 
fiame burning on a rustic altar to consecrate 
and enliven the feast. When the bread and 
cheese were finished and the pipes were filled 
with Virginia tobacco, Sandy would begin to 
tell me, very solemnly and respectfully, about 
the mistakes I had made in the fishing that day, 
and mourn over the fact that the largest fish 
had not been hooked. There was a strong 
strain of pessimism in Sandy, and he enjoyed 
this part of the sport immensely. 

But he was at his best in the walk home 
102 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


through the lingering twilight, when the mur- 
mur of the sea trembled through the air, and 
the incense of burning peat floated up from the 
cottages, and the stars blossomed one by one 
in the pale-green sky. Then Sandy dandered 
on at his ease down the hills, and discoursed of 
things in heaven and earth. He was an uncon- 
scious follower of the theology of the Reverend 
John Jasper, of Richmond, Virginia, and re- 
jected the Copernican theory of the universe 
as inconsistent with the history of Joshua. 
“Gin the sun doesna muve,” said he, “what for 
wad Joshua be tellin’ him to stond steel ’A 
wad suner beleeve there was a mistak’ in the 
veesible heevens than ae fault in the Guid Buik.’’ 
Whereupon we held long discourse of astronomy 
and inspiration; but Sandy concluded it with a 
philosophic word which left little to be said: 
“Aweel, yon teelescope is a wonnerful deescov- 
ery; but ’a dinna think the less o’ the Baible.” 

Ill 

WHITE HEATHER 

Memory is a capricious and arbitrary crea- 
ture. You never can tell what pebble she will 
pick up from the shore of life to keep among 
her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of 
the field she will preserve as the symbol of 

“ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears 
103 


LITTLE RIVERS 

She has her own scale of values for these me- 
mentos, and knows nothing of the market price 
of precious stones or the costly splendour of 
rare orchids. The thing that pleases her is the 
thing that she will hold fast. And yet I do 
not doubt that the most important things are 
always the best remembered; only we must 
learn that the real importance of what we see 
and hear in the world is to be measured at last 
by its meaning, its significance, its intimacy 
with the heart of our heart and the life of our 
life. And when we find a little token of the 
past very safely and imperishably kept among 
our recollections, we must believe that memory 
has made no mistake. It is because that little 
thing has entered into our experience so deeply, 
that it stays with us and we cannot lose it. 

You have half forgotten many a famous 
scene that you travelled far to look upon. You 
cannot clearly recall the sublime peak of Mont 
Blanc, the roaring curve of Niagara, the vast 
dome of St. Peter’s. The music of Patti’s 
crystalline voice has left no distinct echo in 
your remembrance, and the blossoming of the 
century-plant is dimmer than the shadow of a 
dream. But there is a nameless valley among 
the hills where you can still trace every curve 
of the stream, and see the foam-bells floating 
on the pool below the bridge, and the long moss 
wavering in the current. There is a rustic 
104 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


song of a girl passing through the fields at sun- 
set, that still repeats its far-off cadence in your 
listening ears. There is a small flower trem- 
bling on its stem in some hidden nook beneath 
the open sky, that never withers through all 
the changing years; the wind passes over it, 
but it is not gone — ^it abides forever in your 
soul, an amaranthine blossom. 

White heather is not an easy flower to find. 
You may look for it among the highlands for a 
day without success. And when it is discov- 
ered, there is little outward charm to commend 
it. It lacks the grace of the dainty bells that 
hang so abundantly from the Erica Tetralix, 
and the pink glow of the innumerable blossoms 
of the common heather. But then it is a sym- 
bol. It is the Scotch Edelweiss. It means sin- 
cere affection, and unselfish love, and tender 
wishes as pure as prayers. I shall always re- 
member the evening when I found the white 
heather on the moorland above Glen Ericht. 
Or, rather, it was not I that found it (for I have 
little luck in the discovery of good omens, and 
have never plucked a four-leaved clover in my 
life), but my companion, the gentle Mistress of 
the Glen, whose hair was as white as the tiny 
blossoms, and yet whose eyes were far quicker 
than mine to see and name every flower that 
bloomed in those lofty, widespread fields. 

Ericht Water is formed by the marriage of 
105 


LITTLE RIVERS 


two streams, one flowing out of Strath Ardle 
and the other descending from Cairn Gowar 
through the long, lonely Pass of Glenshee. 
The Ericht begins at the bridge of Cally, and 
its placid, beautiful glen, unmarred by railway 
or factory, reaches almost down to Blairgowrie. 
On the southern bank, but far above the water, 
runs the high road to Braemar and the Linn of 
Dee. On the other side of the river, nestling 
among the trees, is the low white manor-house. 

An ancient home of peace,^^ 

It is a place where one who had been wearied 
and perchance sore wounded in the battle of 
life might well desire to be carried, as Arthur to 
the island valley of Avilion, for rest and healing. 

I have no thought of renewing the conflicts 
and cares that fllled that summer with sorrow. 
There were flghtings without and fears within; 
there was the surrender of an enterprise that had 
been cherished since boyhood, and the bitter 
sense of irremediable weakness that follows such 
a reverse; there was a touch of that wrath with 
those we love, which, as Coleridge says, 

^^Doth work like madness in the brain 

flying across the sea from these troubles, I had 
found my Scotch comrade of merrier days sen- 
tenced to death, and caught but a brief glimpse 
106 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


of his pale, brave face as he went away into 
exile. At such a time the sun and the light and 
the moon and the stars are darkened, and the 
clouds return after rain. But through those 
clouds the Mistress of the Glen came to meet 
me — a stranger till then, but an appointed 
friend, a minister of needed grace, an angel of 
quiet comfort. The thick mists of rebellion, 
mistrust, and despair have long since rolled 
away, and against the background of the hills 
her figure stands out clearly, dressed in the 
fashion of fifty years ago, with the snowy hair 
gathered close beneath her widow’s cap, and a 
spray of white heather in her outstretched 
hand. 

There were no other guests in the house by 
the river during those still days in the noontide 
hush of midsummer. Every morning, while the 
Mistress was busied with her household cares 
and her letters, I would be out in the fields 
hearing the lark sing, and watching the rab- 
bits as they ran to and fro, scattering the dew 
from the grass in a glittering spray. Or per- 
haps I would be angling down the river, with 
the swift pressure of the water around my knees, 
and an inarticulate current of cooling thoughts 
flowing on and on through my brain like the 
murmur of the stream. Every afternoon there 
were long walks with the Mistress in the old- 
fashioned garden, where wonderful roses were 
107 


LITTLE RIVERS 


blooming; or through the dark, fir-shaded ^^den” 
where the wild burn dropped down to join the 
river; or out upon the high moor under the 
waning orange sunset. Every night there were 
luminous and restful talks beside the open fire 
in the library, when the words came clear and 
calm from the heart, unperturbed by the vain 
desire of saying brilliant things, which turns so 
much of our conversation into a combat of 
wits Instead of an interchange of thoughts. 
Talk like this is possible only between two. 
The arrival of a third person sets the lists for a 
tournament, and offers the prize for a verbal 
victory. But where there are only two, the 
armour is laid aside, and there is no call to thrust 
and parry. 

One of the two should be a good listener, 
sympathetic, but not silent, giving confidence 
in order to attract it — ^and of this art a woman 
is the best master. But its finest secrets do not 
come to her until she has passed beyond the 
uncertain season of compliments and conquests, 
and entered into the serenity of a tranquil age. 

What is this foolish thing that men say about 
the impossibility of true intimacy and converse 
between the young and the old? Hamerton, 
for example, in his book on Human Intercourse^ 
would have us believe that a difference in years 
is a barrier between hearts. For my part, I 
have more often found it an open door, and a 
108 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 

security of generous and tolerant welcome for 
the young soldier, who comes in tired and 
dusty from the battle-field, to tell his story of 
defeat or victory in the garden of still thoughts 
where old age is resting in the peace of honour- 
able discharge. I like what Robert Louis 
Stevenson says about it in his essay on Talk 
and Talkers, 

‘‘Not only is the presence of the aged in it- 
self remedial, but their minds are stored with 
antidotes, wisdom’s simples, plain considera- 
tions overlooked by youth. They have matter 
to communicate, be they never so stupid. 
Their talk is not merely literature, it is great 
literature; classic by virtue of the speaker’s 
detachment; studded, like a book of travel, 
with things we should not otherwise have learnt. 
. . . Where youth agrees with age, not where 
they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the 
young disciple finds his heart to beat in tune 
with his gray-haired teacher’s that a lesson 
may be learned.” 

The conversation of the Mistress of the Glen 
shone like the light and distilled like the dew, 
not only by virtue of what she said, but still 
more by virtue of what she was. Her face was 
a good counsel against discouragement; and the 
cheerful quietude of her demeanour was a re- 
buke to all rebellious, cowardly, and discon- 
tented thoughts. It was not the striking nov- 
109 


LITTLE RIVERS 


elty or profundity of her commentary on life 
that made it memorable, it was simply the 
truth of what she said and the gentleness with 
which she said it. 

Epigrams are worth little for guidance to the 
perplexed, and less for comfort to the wounded. 
But the plain, homely sayings which come from 
a soul that has learned the lesson of patient 
courage in the school of real experience, fall 
upon the wound like drops of balsam, and like 
a soothing lotion upon the eyes smarting and 
blinded with passion. 

She spoke of those who had walked with her 
long ago in her garden, and for whose sake, 
now that they had all gone into the world of 
light, every flower was doubly dear. Would 
it be a true proof of loyalty to them if she lived 
gloomily or despondently because they were 
away.f^ She spoke of the duty of being ready 
to welcome happiness as well as to endure pain, 
and of the strength that endurance wins by 
being grateful for small daily joys, like the even- 
ing light, and the smell of roses, and the singing 
of birds. She spoke of the faith that rests on 
the Unseen Wisdom and Love like a child on 
its mother’s breast, and of the melting away of 
doubts in the warmth of an effort to do some 
good in the world. And if that effort has con- 
flict, and adventure, and confused noise, and 
mistakes, and even defeats mingled with it, in 
110 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


the stormy years of youth, is not that to be 
expected? The burn roars and leaps in the 
den; the stream chafes and frets through the 
rapids of the glen; the river does not grow calm 
and smooth until it nears the sea. Courage is 
a virtue that the young cannot spare; to lose it 
is to grow old before the time; it is better to 
make a thousand mistakes and suffer a thou- 
sand reverses than to refuse the battle. Resig- 
nation is the final courage of old age; it arrives 
in its own season; and it is a good day when it 
comes to us. Then there are no more disap- 
pointments; for we have learned that it is even 
better to desire the things that we have than 
to have the things that we desire. And is not 
the best of all our hopes — ^the hope of immor- 
tality — ^always before us ? How can we be dull 
or heavy while we have that new experience 
to look forward to? It will be the most joy- 
ful of all our travels and adventures. It will 
bring us our best acquaintances and friendships. 
But there is only one way to get ready for 
immortality, and that is to love this life, and 
live it as bravely and cheerfully and faithfully 
as we can. 

So my gentle teacher with the silver hair 
showed me the treasures of her ancient, simple 
faith; and I felt that no sermons, nor books, 
nor arguments can strengthen the doubting 
heart so deeply as just to come into touch with 
111 


LITTLE RIVERS 


a soul which has proved the truth of that plain 
religion whose highest philosophy is “Trust in 
the Lord and do good.” At the end of the 
evening the household was gathered for prayers, 
and the Mistress kneeled among her servants, 
leading them, in her soft Scottish accent, 
through the old familiar petitions for pardon 
for the errors of the day, and refreshing sleep 
through the night and strength for the mor- 
row. It is good to be in a land where the peo- 
ple are not ashamed to pray. I have shared 
the blessing of Catholics at their table in lowly 
huts among the mountains of the Tyrol, and 
knelt with Covenanters at their household 
altar in the glens of Scotland ; and all around the 
world, where the spirit of prayer is, there is 
peace. The genius of the Scotch has made 
many contributions to literature, but none I 
think, more precious, and none that comes 
closer to the heart than the prayer which 
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote for his family 
in distant Samoa, the night before he died: — 

beseech thee. Lord, to behold us with favour, folk of 
many families and nations, gathered together in the 'peace 
of this roof : weak men and women subsisting under the 
covert of thy patience. Be patient still ; suffer us yet a 
while longer — with our broken promises of good, 'with our 
idle endeavours against evil — suffer us a while longer to 
endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us 
our extraordinary mercies ; if the day come when these 
112 


A HANDFUL OF HEATHER 


must he iakeriy have us play the man under affliction. Be 
with our friends, he with ourselves. Go with each of us to 
rest ; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watch- 
ing ; and when the day returns to us — our sun and com- 
forter — call us with morning faces, eager to labour, eager to 
he happy, if happiness shall he our portion, and, if the day 
he marked to sorrow, strong to endure it. We thank thee 
and praise thee ; and, in the words of Him to whom this 
day is sacred, close our ohlation,*^ 


The man who made that kindly human 
prayer knew the meaning of white heather. 
And I dare to hope that I too have known 
something of its meaning, since that evening 
when the Mistress of the Glen picked the spray 
and gave it to me on the lonely moor. 

"‘And now,” she said, “you will be going 
home across the sea; and you have been wel- 
come here, but it is time that you should go, 
for there is the place where your real duties 
and troubles and joys are waiting for you. 
And if you have left any misunderstandings 
behind you, you will try to clear them up; 
and if there have been any quarrels, you will 
heal them. Carry this little flower with you. 
It ’s not the bonniest blossom in Scotland, but. 
it ’s the dearest, for the message that it brings. 
And you will remember that love is not get- 
ting, but giving; not a wild dream of pleasure, 
and a madness of desire — oh no, love is not 
that — ^it is goodness, and honour, and peace,. 

113 


LITTLE RIVERS 


and pure living — yes, love is that; and it is the 
best thing in the world, and the thing that lives 
longest. And that is what I am wishing for 
you and yours with this bit of white heather.” 

1893. 


114 


THE RISTIGOUCHE FROM A 
HORSE-YACHT 


“Dr. Paley was ardently attached to this amusement ; so much so, that 
when the Bishop of Durham inquired of him when one of his most important 
works would he finished, he said, with great simplicity and good humour, 
* My Lord, I shall work steadily at it when the fly-fishing season is over.’” 
— Sir Humphry Davy: Salmonia. 


THE RISTIGOUCHE FROM A 
HORSE-YACHT 



'E boundary line between the Province of 


^ Quebec and New Brunswick, for a consider- 
able part of its course, resembles the name of 
the poet Keats; it is ‘‘writ in water.” But like 
his fame, it is water that never fails, — ^the limpid 
current of the river Ristigouche. 

The railway crawls over it on a long bridge 
at Metapedia, and you are dropped in the 
darkness somewhere between midnight and 
dawn. When you open your window-shutters 
the next morning, you see that the village is a 
disconsolate hamlet, scattered along the track 
as if it had been shaken by chance from an 
open freight-car; it consists of twenty houses, 
three shops, and a discouraged church perched 
upon a little hillock like a solitary mourner on 
the anxious seat. The one comfortable and 
prosperous feature in the countenance of Meta- 
pedia is the house of the Ristigouche Salmon 
Club — ^an old-fashioned mansion, with broad, 
white piazza, looking over rich meadow-lands. 
Here it was that I found my friend Favonius, 
president of solemn societies, pillar of church 


117 


LITTLE RIVERS 


and state, ingenuously arrayed in gray knicker- 
bockers, a flannel shirt, and a soft hat, waiting 
to take me on his horse-yacht for a voyage up 
the river. 

Have you ever seen a horse-yacht? Some- 
times it is called a scow; but that sounds com- 
mon. Sometimes it is called a house-boat; 
but that is too English. What does it profit a 
man to have a whole dictionary full of language 
at his service, unless he can invent a new and 
suggestive name for his friend’s pleasure-craft? 
The foundation of the horse-yacht — ^if a thing 
that floats may be called fundamental — ^is a 
flat-bottomed boat, some fifty feet long and ten 
feet wide, with a draft of about eight inches. 
The deck is open for fifteen feet aft of the place 
where the bowsprit ought to be; behind that it 
is completely covered by a house, cabin, cot- 
tage, or whatever you choose to call it, with 
straight sides and a peaked roof of a very early 
Gothic pattern. Looking in at the door you 
see, first of all, two cots, one on either side of 
the passage; then an open space with a dining- 
table, a stove, and some chairs; beyond that a 
pantry with shelves, and a great chest for pro- 
visions. A door at the back opens into the 
kitchen, and from that another door opens into 
a sleeping-room for the boatmen. A huge 
wooden tiller curves over the stem of the boat, 
and the helmsman stands upon the kitchen- 
118 


THE RISTIGOUCHE 


roof. Two canoes are floating behind, holding 
back at the end of their long tow-ropes, as if 
reluctant to follow so clumsy a leader. This 
is an accurate description of the horse-yacht. 
If necessary it could be sworn to before a notary 
public. But I am perfectly sure that you 
might read this page through without skipping 
a word, and if you had never seen the creature 
with your own eyes, you would have no idea 
how absurd it looks and how comfortable it is. 

While we were stowing away our trunks and 
bags under the cots, and making an equitable 
division of the hooks upon the walls, the motive 
power of the yacht stood patiently upon the 
shore, stamping a hoof, now and then, or shak- 
ing a shaggy head in mild protest against the 
flies. Three more pessimistic-looking horses I 
never saw. They were harnessed abreast, and 
fastened by a prodigious tow-rope to a short 
post in the middle of the forward deck. Their 
driver was a truculent, brigandish, bearded old 
fellow in long boots, a blue flannel shirt, and a 
black sombrero. He sat upon the middle horse, 
and some wild instinct of colour had made him 
tie a big red handkerchief around his shoulders, 
so that the eye of the beholder took delight in 
him. He posed like a bold, bad robber-chief. 
But in point of fact I believe he was the mildest 
and most inoffensive of men. We never heard 
him say anything except at a distance, to his 
119 


LITTLE RIVERS 

horses, and we did not inquire what that 
was. 

Well, as I have said, we were haggling cour- 
teously over those hooks in the cabin, when the 
boat gave a lurch. The bow swung out into 
the stream. There was a scrambling and clat- 
tering of iron horse-shoes on the rough shingle 
of the bank; and when we looked out of doors, 
our house was moving up the river with the 
boat under it. 

The Ristigouche is a noble stream, stately 
and swift and strong. It rises among the dense 
forests in the northern part of New Brunswick 
— a moist upland region, of never-failing springs 
and innumerable lakes — ^and pours a flood of 
clear, cold water one hundred and flfty miles 
northward and eastward through the hills into 
the head of the Bay of Chaleurs. There are no 
falls in its course, but rapids everywhere. It 
is steadfast but not impetuous, quick but not 
turbulent, resolute and eager in its desire to 
get to the sea, like the life of a man who has a 
purpose 

‘"Too great for haste^ too high for rivalry, 

The wonder is where all the water comes from. 
But the river is fed by more than six thousand 
square miles of territory. From both sides the 
little brooks come dashing in with their supply. 
At intervals a larger stream, reaching away 
120 


THE RISTIGOUCHE 

back among the mountains like a hand with 
many fingers to gather 

“ The filtered tribute of the rough woodland 

delivers its generous offering to the main cur- 
rent. 

The names of the chief tributaries of the Ris- 
tigouche are curious. There is the headstrong 
Metapedia, and the crooked TJpsalquitch, and 
the Patapedia, and the Quatawamkedgwick. 
These are words at which the tongue balks at 
first, but you soon grow used to them and learn 
to take anything of five syllables with a rush, 
as a hunter takes a five-barred gate, trusting to 
fortune that you will come down with the accent 
in the right place. 

For six or seven miles above Metapedia the 
river has a breadth of about two hundred yards, 
and the valley slopes back rather gently to the 
mountains on either side. There is a good deal 
of cultivated land, and scattered farm-houses 
appear. The soil is excellent. But it is like 
a pearl cast before an obstinate, unfriendly 
climate. Late frosts prolong the winter. Early 
frosts curtail the summer. The only safe crops 
are grass, oats, and potatoes. And for half the 
year all the cattle must be housed and fed to 
keep them alive. This lends a melancholy as- 
pect to agriculture. Most of the farmers look 
as if they had never seen better days. With 
121 


LITTLE RIVERS 


few exceptions they are what a New Englander 
would call “slack-twisted and shiftless.” Their 
barns are pervious to the weather, and their 
fences fail to connect. Sleds and ploughs rust 
together beside the house, and chickens scratch 
up the front-door yard. In truth, the people 
have been somewhat demoralised by the con- 
flicting claims of different occupations; hunting 
in the fall, lumbering in the winter and spring, 
and working for the American sportsmen in the 
brief angling season, are so much more attrac- 
tive and offer so much larger returns of ready 
money, that the tedious toil of farming is neg- 
lected. But for all that, in the bright days of 
midsummer, these green fields sloping down to 
the water, and pastures high up among the trees 
on the hillsides, look pleasant from a distance, 
and give an inhabited air to the landscape. 

At the mouth of the Upsalquitch we passed 
the first of the fishing-lodges. It belongs to a 
sage angler from Albany who saw the beauty 
of the situation, years ago, and built a habita- 
tion to match it. Since that time a number of 
gentlemen have bought land fronting on good 
pools, and put up little cottages of a less classi- 
cal style than Charles Cotton’s “Fisherman’s 
Retreat” on the banks of the river Dove, but 
better suited to this wild scenery, and more 
convenient to live in. The prevailing pattern 
is a very simple one; it consists of a broad piazza 
122 


THE RISTIGOUCHE 


with a small house in the middle of it. The 
house bears about the same proportion to the 
piazza that the crown of a Gainsborough hat 
does to the brim. And the cost of the edifice 
is to the cost of the land as the first price of a 
share in a bankrupt railway is to the assessments 
which follow the reorganisation. All the best 
points have been sold, and real estate on the 
Ristigouche has been bid up to an absurd fig- 
ure. In fact, the river is over-populated and 
probably over-fished. But we could hardly 
find it in our hearts to regret this, for it made 
the upward trip a very sociable one. At every 
lodge that was open, Favonius (who knows 
everybody) had a friend, and we must slip 
ashore in a canoe to leave the mail and refresh 
the inner man. 

An angler, like an Arab, regards hospitality 
as a religious duty. There seems to be some- 
thing in the craft which inclines the heart to 
kindness and good-fellowship. Few anglers have 
I seen who were not pleasant to meet, and ready 
to do a good turn to a fellow-fisherman with the 
gift of a killing fly or the loan of a rod. Not 
their own particular and well-proved favourite, 
of course, for that is a treasure which no decent 
man would borrow; but with that exception the 
best in their store is at the service of an accred- 
ited brother. One of the Ristigouche propri- 
etors I remember, whose name bespoke him a 
123 


LITTLE RIVERS 


descendant of Caledonia’s patron saint. He 
was fishing in front of his own door when we 
came up, with our splashing horses, through 
the pool; but nothing would do but he must up 
anchor and have us away with him into the house 
to taste his good cheer. And there were his 
daughters with their books and needlework, 
and the photographs which they had taken 
pinned up on the wooden walls, among Japa- 
nese fans and bits of bright-coloured stpff in 
which the soul of woman delights, and, in a 
passive, silent way, the soul of man also. Then, 
after we had discussed the year’s fishing, and 
the mysteries of the camera, and the deep ques- 
tion of what makes some negatives too thin 
and others too thick, we must go out to see the 
big salmon which one of the ladies had caught 
a few days before, and the large trout swim- 
ming about in their cold spring. It seemed to 
me, as we went on our way, that there could 
hardly be a more wholesome and pleasant 
summer-life for well-bred young women than 
this, or two amusements more innocent and sen- 
sible than photography and fly-fishing. 

It must be confessed that the horse-yacht as 
a vehicle of travel is not remarkable in point 
of speed. Three miles an hour is not a very 
rapid rate of motion. But then, if you are not 
in a hurry, why should you care to make haste ? 

The wild desire to be forever racing against 
124 


THE RISTIGOUCHE 


old Father Time is one of the kill- joys of mod- 
ern life. That ancient traveller is sure to beat 
you in the long run, and as long as you are try- 
ing to rival him, he will make your life a burden. 
But if you will only acknowledge his superiority 
and profess that you do not approve of racing 
after all, he will settle down quietly beside you, 
and jog along like the most companionable of 
creatures. That is a pleasant pilgrimage in 
which the journey itself is part of the destina- 
tion. 

As soon as one learns to regard the horse- 
yacht as a sort of moving house, it appears 
admirable. There is no dust or smoke, no rum- 
ble of wheels, or shriek of whistles. You are 
gliding along steadily through an ever-green 
world; skirting the silent hills; passing from one 
side of the river to the other when the horses 
have to swim the current to find a good foot- 
hold on the bank. You are on the water, but 
not at its mercy, for your craft is not disturbed 
by the heaving of rude waves, and the serene 
inhabitants do not say ‘T am sick.” There is 
room enough to move about without falling 
overboard. You may sleep, or read, or write 
in your cabin, or sit upon the floating piazza in 
an arm-chair and smoke the pipe of peace, 
while the cool breeze blows in your face and the 
musical waves go singing down to the sea. 

There was one feature about the boat, which 
125 


LITTLE RIVERS 


commended itself very strongly to my mind. 
It was possible to stand upon the forward deck 
and do a little trout-fishing in motion. By 
watching your chance, when the corner of a 
good pool was within easy reach, you could send 
out a hasty line and cajole a sea-trout from his 
hiding-place. It is true that the tow-ropes and 
the post made the back cast a little awkward; 
and the wind sometimes blew the flies up on 
the roof of the cabin; but then, with p'atience 
and a short line the thing could be done. I re- 
member a pair of good trout that rose together 
just as we were going through a boiling rapid; 
and it tried the strength of my split-bamboo 
rod to bring those fish to the net against the 
current and the motion of the boat. 

When nightfall approached we made fast the 
moorings (to wit, a rope tied to a large rock on 
the shore), ate our dinner ‘^ith gladness and 
singleness of heart” like the early Christians, 
and slept the sleep of the just, lulled by the 
murmuring of the waters, and defended from 
the insidious attacks of the mosquito by the 
breeze blowing down the river and the impreg- 
nable curtains over our beds. At daybreak, 
long before Favonius and I had finished our 
dreams, we were under way again; and when 
the trampling of the horses on some rocky shore 
wakened us, we could see the steep hills gliding 
past the windows and hear the rapids dashing 
126 


THE RISTIGOUCHE 


against the side of the boat, and it seemed as 
if we were still dreaming. 

At Cross Point, where the river makes a long 
loop around a narrow mountain, thin as a saw 
and crowned on its jagged edge by a rude 
wooden cross, we stopped for an hour to try 
the fishing. It was here that I hooked two 
mysterious creatures, each of which took the 
fly when it was below the surface, pulled for a 
few moments in a sullen way and then appar- 
ently melted into nothingness. It will always 
be a source of regret to me that the nature of 
these fish must remain unknown. While they 
were on the line it was the general opinion that 
they were heavy trout; but no sooner had they 
departed, than I became firmly convinced, in 
accordance with a psychological law which holds 
good all over the world, that they were both 
enormous salmon. Even the Turks have a 
proverb which says, ‘‘Every fish that escapes 
appears larger than it is.” No one can alter 
that conviction, because no one can logically 
refute it. Our best blessings, like our largest 
fish, always depart before we have time to 
measure them. 

The Slide Pool is in the wildest and most pic- 
turesque part of the river, about thirty-five 
miles above Metapedia. The stream, flowing 
swiftly down a stretch of rapids between forest- 
clad hills, runs straight toward the base of an 
127 


LITTLE EIVERS 


eminence so precipitous that the trees can hardly 
find a foothold upon it, and seem to be climbing 
up in haste on either side of the long slide which 
leads to the summit. The current, barred by 
the wall of rock, takes a great sweep to the right, 
dashing up at first in angry waves, then falling 
away in oily curves and eddies, until at last it 
sleeps in a black deep, apparently almost mo- 
tionless, at the foot of the hill. It wg^s here, on 
the upper edge of the stream, opposite to the 
slide, that we brought our floating camp to an- 
chor for some days. What does one do in such 
a watering-place 

Let us take a ^‘specimen day.” It is early 
morning, or to be more precise, about eight of 
the clock, and the white fog is just beginning 
to curl and drift away from the surface of the 
river. Sooner than this it would be idle to go 
out. The preternaturally early bird in his greedy 
haste may catch the worm; but the salmon do 
not take the fly until the fog has lifted; and in 
this the scientific angler sees, with gratitude, a 
remarkable adaptation of the laws of nature to 
the tastes of man. The canoes are waiting at 
the front door. We step into them and push 
off, Favonius going up the stream a couple of 
miles to the mouth of the Patapedia, and I 
down, a little shorter distance, to the famous 
Indian House Pool. The slim boat glides easily 
on the current, with a smooth buoyant motion, 
128 


THE RISTIGOUCHE 


quickened by the strokes of the paddles in the 
bow and the stern. We pass around two curves 
in the river and find ourselves at the head of 
the pool. Here the man in the stern drops the 
anchor, just on the edge of the bar* where the 
rapid breaks over into the deeper water. The 
long rod is lifted; the fiy unhooked from the 
reel; a few feet of line pulled through the rings, 
and the fishing begins. 

First cast, — ^to the right, straight across the 
stream, about twenty feet: the current carries 
the fly down with a semicircular sweep, until it 
comes in line with the bow of the canoe. Second 
cast, — ^to the left, straight across the stream, 
with the same motion: the semicircle is com- 
pleted, and the fly hangs quivering for a few 
seconds at the lowest point of the arc. Three 
or four feet of line are drawn from the reel. 
Third cast to the right; fourth cast to the left. 
Then a little more line. And so, with widen- 
ing half-circles, the water is covered, gradually 
and very carefully, until at length the angler 
has as much line out as his two-handed rod can 
lift and swing. Then the first “drop” is fin- 
ished; the man in the stern quietly pulls up the 
anchor and lets the boat drift down a few yards; 
the same process is repeated on the second drop; 
and so on, until the end of the run is reached 
and the fly has passed over all the good water. 
This seems like a very regular and somewhat 
129 


LITTLE RIVERS 


mechanical proceeding as one describes it, but 
in the performance it is rendered intensely inter- 
esting by the knowledge that at any moment it 
is liable to be interrupted. 

This morning the interruption comes early. 
At the first cast of the second drop, before the 
fly has fairly lit, a great flash of silver darts 
from the waves close by the boat. Usually a 
salmon takes the fly rather slowly, carrying it 
under water before he seizes it in his mouth. 
But this one is in no mood for deliberation. He 
has hooked himself with a rush, and the line 
goes whirring madly from the reel as he races 
down the pool. Keep the point of the rod 
rather low but still at an angle with the line, so 
that he can’t get a dead pull on it. The salmon 
must feel the spring of the rod always; but other- 
wise he must have his own way now. Up 
with the anchor quickly, and send the canoe 
after him, bowman and sternman paddling with 
swift strokes. He has reached the deepest 
water; he stops to think what has happened to 
him; we have passed around and below him; 
and now, with the current to help us, we can 
begin to reel in. Lift the point of the rod, 
with a strong, steady pull. Put the force of 
both arms into it. The tough wood will stand 
the strain. The fish must be moved; he must 
come to the boat if he is ever to be landed. He 
gives a little and yields slowly to the pressure. 

130 


THE RISTIGOUCHE 

Then suddenly he gives too much, and runs 
straight toward us. Reel in now as swiftly as 
possible, or else he will get a slack on the line 
and escape. Now he stops, shakes his head 
from side to side, and darts away again across 
the pool, leaping high out of water. Don’t 
touch the reel ! Drop the point of the rod 
quickly, for if he falls on the leader he will 
surely break it. Another leap, and another! 
Truly he is ‘‘a merry one,” and it will go hard 
with us to hold him. But those great leaps 
have exhausted his strength, and now he follows 
the rod more easily. The men push the boat 
back to the shallow side of the pool until it 
touches lightly on the shore. The fish comes 
slowly in, fighting a little and making a few 
short runs; he is tired and turns slightly on 
his side, but even yet he is a heavy weight on 
the line, and it seems a wonder that so slight a 
thing as the leader can guide and draw him. 
Now he is close to the boat. The boatman 
steps out on a rock with his gaff. Steadily 
now and slowly, lift the rod. A quick sure 
stroke of the steel ! a great splash ! and the sal- 
mon is lifted upon the shore. How he flounces 
about on the stones. Give him the cou'p de 
grace at once, for his own sake as well as for 
ours. And now look at him, as he lies there on 
the green leaves. Broad back; small head taper- 
ing to a point; clean, shining sides with a few 
131 


LITTLE RIVERS 


black spots on them; it is a twenty pound fish 
fresh-run from the sea, in perfect condition, 
and that is the reason why he has given such 
good sport. 

We must try for another before we go back. 
Again fortune favours us, and at eleven o’clock 
we pole up the river to the camp with two good 
salmon in the canoe. Hardly have we laid 
them away in the ice-box, when Favonius comes 
dropping down from Patapedia with three fish, 
one of them a twenty-four pounder. And so 
the morning’s work is done. 

In the evening, after dinner, it was our cus- 
tom to sit out on the deck, watching the moon- 
light as it fell softly over the black hills and 
changed the river into a pale flood of rolling 
gold. The fragrant wreaths of smoke floated 
lazily away on the faint breeze of night. There 
was no sound save the rushing of the water 
and the crackling of the camp-fire on the shore. 
We talked of many things in the heavens above, 
and the earth beneath, and the waters under the 
earth; touching lightly here and there as the 
spirit of vagrant converse led us. Favonius 
has the good sense to talk about himself occa- 
sionally and tell his own experience. The man 
who will not do that must always be a dull com- 
panion. Modest egoism is the salt of conver- 
sation: you do not want too much of it; but if 
it is altogether omitted, everything tastes flat. 

132 


THE RISTIGOUCHE 


I remember well the evening when he told me 
the story of the Sheep of the Wilderness. 

‘T was ill that summer,” said he, ‘‘and the 
doctor had ordered me to go into the woods, 
but on no account to go without plenty of fresh 
meat, which was essential to my recovery. So 
we set out into the wild country north of Geor- 
gian Bay, taking a live sheep with us in order 
to be sure that the doctor’s prescription might 
be faithfully followed. It was a young and 
innocent little beast, curling itself up at my feet 
in the canoe, and following me about on shore 
like a dog. I gathered grass every day to feed 
it, and carried it in my arms over the rough 
portages. It ate out of my hand and rubbed 
its woolly head against my leggings. To my 
dismay, I found that I was beginning to love 
it for its own sake and without any ulterior 
motives. The thought of killing and eating it 
became more and more painful to me, until at 
length the fatal fascination was complete, and 
my trip became practically an exercise of devo- 
tion to that sheep. I carried it everywhere 
and ministered fondly to its wants. Not for 
the world would I have alluded to mutton in its 
presence. And when we returned to civilisa- 
tion I parted from the creature with sincere 
regret and the consciousness that I had hu- 
moured my affections at the expense of my 
digestion. The sheep did not give me so much 
133 


LITTLE RIVERS 


as a look of farewell, but fell to feeding on the 
grass beside the farm-house with an air of 
placid triumph.” 

After hearing this touching tale, I was glad 
that no great intimacy had sprung up between 
Eavonius and the chickens which we carried in 
a coop on the forecastle head, for there is no 
telling what restrictions his tender-heartedness 
might have laid upon our larder. But perhaps 
a chicken would not have given such an opening 
for misplaced affection as a sheep. There is a 
great difference in animals in this respect. I 
certainly never heard of any one falling in love 
with a salmon in such a way as to regard it as 
a fond companion. And this may be one rea- 
son why no sensible person who has tried fish- 
ing has ever been able to see any cruelty 
in it. 

Suppose the fish is not caught by an angler, 
what is his alternative fate.^ He will either 
perish miserably in the struggles of the crowded 
net, or die of old age and starvation like the 
long, lean stragglers which are sometimes found 
in the shallow pools, or be devoured by a larger 
fish, or torn to pieces by a seal or an otter. 
Compared with any of these miserable deaths, 
the fate of a salmon who is hooked in a clear 
stream and after a glorious fight receives the 
happy despatch at the moment when he touches 
the shore, is a sort of euthanasia. And, since 
134 


THE RISTIGOUCHE 


the fish was made to be man’s food, the angler 
who brings him to the table of destiny in the 
cleanest, quickest, kindest way is, in fact, his 
benefactor. 

There were some days, however, when our 
benevolent intentions toward the salmon were 
frustrated; mornings when they refused to rise, 
and evenings when they escaped even the skil- 
ful endeavours of Favonius. In vain did he try 
every fly in his book, from the smallest “Silver 
Doctor” to the largest “Golden Eagle.” The 
“Black Dose” would not move them. The 
“Durham Ranger” covered the pool in vain. 
On days like this, if a stray fish rose, it was hard 
to land him, for he was usually but slightly 
hooked. 

I remember one of these shy creatures which 
led me a pretty dance at the mouth of Pata- 
pedia. He came to the fly just at dusk, rising 
very softly and quietly, as if he did not really 
care for it but only wanted to see what it was 
like. He went down at once into deep water, 
and began the most dangerous and exasperating 
of all salmon-tactics, moving around in slow 
circles and shaking his head from side to side, 
with sullen pertinacity. This is called “jig- 
ging,” and unless it can be stopped, the result 
is fatal. 

I could not stop it. That salmon was deter- 
mined to jig. He knew more than I did. 

135 


LITTLE RIVERS 


The canoe followed him down the pool. He 
jigged away past all three of the inlets of the 
Patapedia, and at last, in the still, deep water 
below, after we had laboured with him for half 
an hour, and brought him near enough to see 
that he was immense, he calmly opened his 
mouth and the fly came back to me void. That 
was a sad evening, in which all the consolations 
of philosophy were needed. 

Sunday was a very peaceful day in our camp. 
In the Dominion of Canada, the question ‘Ho 
fish or not to fish’’ on the first day of the week 
is not left to the frailty of the individual con- 
science. The law on the subject is quite ex- 
plicit, and says that between six o’clock on 
Saturday evening and six o’clock on Monday 
morning all nets shall be taken up and no one 
shall wet a line. The Ristigouche Salmon Club 
has its guardians stationed all along the river, 
and they are quite as inflexible in seeing that 
their employers keep this law as the famous 
sentinel was in refusing to let Napoleon pass 
without the countersign. But I do not think 
that these keen sportsmen regard it as a hard- 
ship; they are quite willing that the fish should 
have “an off day” in every week, and only 
grumble because some of the net-owners down 
at the mouth of the river have brought political 
influence to bear in their favour and obtained 
exemption from the rule. For our part, we 
136 


THE RISTIGOUCHE 

were nothing loath to hang up our rods, and 
make the day different from other days. 

In the morning we had a service in the cabin 
of the boat, gathering a little congregation of 
guardians and boatmen, and people from a soli- 
tary farm-house by the river. They came in 
'pirogues — ^long, narrow boats hollowed from the 
trunk of a tree; the black-eyed, brown-faced 
girls sitting back to back in the middle of the 
boat, and the men standing up bending to their 
poles. It seemed a picturesque way of travel- 
ling, although none too safe. 

In the afternoon we sat on deck and looked 
at the water. What a charm there is in watch- 
ing a swift stream ! The eye never wearies of 
following its curls and eddies, the shadow of the 
waves dancing over the stones, the strange, 
crinkling lines of sunlight in the shallows. There 
is a sort of fascination in it, lulling and soothing 
the mind into a quietude which is even pleasanter 
than sleep, and making it almost possible to do 
that of which we so often speak, but which we 
never quite accomplish — “think about nothing.” 
Out on the edge of the pool, we could see five 
or six huge salmon, moving slowly from side to 
side, or lying motionless like gray shadows. 
There was nothing to break the silence except 
the thin clear whistle of the white-throated 
sparrow far back in the woods. This is almost 
the only bird-song that one hears on the river, 
137 


LITTLE RIVERS 


unless you count the metallic ‘‘cAr-r-r-r” of the 
kingfisher as a song. 

Every now and then one of the salmon in the 
pool would lazily roll out of water, or spring 
high into the air and fall back with a heavy 
splash. What is it that makes salmon leap.^ 
Is it pain or pleasure ? Do they do it to escape 
the attack of another fish, or to shake off a 
parasite that clings to them, or to practise 
jumping so that they can ascend the falls when 
they reach them, or simply and solely out of 
exuberant gladness and joy of living ? Any one 
of these reasons would be enough to account 
for it on week-days. On Sunday I am quite 
sure they do it for the trial of the fisherman’s 
faith. 

But how should I tell all the little incidents 
which made that lazy voyage so delightful.^ 
Favonius was the ideal host, for on water, as 
well as on land, he knows how to provide for 
the liberty as well as for the wants of his guests. 
He understands also the fine art of conversation, 
which consists of silence as well as speech. 
And when it comes to angling, Izaak Walton 
himself could not have been a more profitable 
teacher by precept or example. Indeed, it is 
a curious thought, and one full of sadness to a 
well-constituted mind, that on the Ristigouche 
‘T. W.” would have been at sea, for the beloved 
father of all fishermen passed through this world 
138 


THE RISTIGOUCHE 


without ever catching a salmon. So ill does 
fortune match with merit here below. 

At last the days of idleness were ended. We 
could not 

Fold our tents like the Arabs, 

And as silently steal away^^; 

but we took down the long rods, put away the 
heavy reels, made the canoes fast to the side of 
the house, embarked the three horses on the 
front deck, and then dropped down with the 
current, swinging along through the rapids, and 
drifting slowly through the still places, now 
grounding on a hidden rock, and now sweeping 
around a sharp curve, until at length we saw the 
roofs of Metapedia and the ugly bridge of the 
railway spanning the river. There we left our 
floating house, awkward and helpless, like some 
strange relic of the flood, stranded on the shore. 
And as we climbed the bank we looked back 
and wondered whether Noah was sorry when he 
said good-bye to his ark. 

1888. 


139 



ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S 
MILK 


**Nay, let me tell you, there he many that have forty times our estates, that 
vx)uld give the greatest part of it to be healthful and cheerful like us; who, 
with the expense of a little money, have ate, and drank, and laughed, and 
angled, and sung, and slept securely; and rose next day, and cast away 
care, and sung, and laughed, and angled again ; which are blessings rick 
men cannot purchase with all their money — Izaak Walton: The Com-- 
plete Angler. 


ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S 
MILK 



GREAT deal of the pleasure of life lies in 


bringing together things which have no 
connection. That is the secret of humour — ^at 
least so we are told by the philosophers who ex- 
plain the jests that other men have made — ^and 
in regard to travel, I am quite sure that it must 
be illogical in order to be entertaining. The 
more contrasts it contains, the better. 

Perhaps it was some philosophical reflection 
of this kind that brought me to the resolution, 
on a certain summer day, to make a little jour- 
ney, as straight as possible, from the sea-level 
streets of Venice to the lonely, lofty summit of 
a Tyrolese mountain, called, for no earthly 
reason that I can discover, the Gross- Venediger. 

But apart from the philosophy of the matter, 
which I must confess to passing over very super- 
ficially at the time, there were other and more 
cogent reasons for wanting to go from Venice to 
the Big Venetian. It was the first of July, and 
the city on the sea was becoming tepid. A 
slumbrous haze brooded over canals and pal- 
aces and churches. It was difficult to keep 


143 


LITTLE RIVERS 


one’s conscience awake to Baedeker and a sense 
of moral obligation; Ruskin was impossible, 
and a picture-gallery was a penance. We floated 
lazily from one place to another, and decided 
that, after all, it was too warm to go in. The 
cries of the gondoliers, at the canal corners, 
grew more and more monotonous and dreamy. 
There was danger of our falling fast asleep and 
having to pay by the hour for a day’s repose 
in a gondola. If it grew much warmer, we 
might be compelled to stay until the following 
winter hi order to recover energy enough to get 
away. All the signs of the times pointed north- 
ward, to the mountains, where we should see 
glaciers and snow-flelds, and pick Alpenrosen, 
and drink goat’s milk fresh from the real goat. 

I 

The first stage on the journey thither was by 
rail to Belluno — ^about four or five hours. It is 
a suflScient commentary on railway travel that 
the most important thing about it is to tell how 
many hours it takes to get from one place to 
another. 

We arrived in Belluno at night, and when we 
awoke the next morning we found ourselves in 
a picturesque little city of Venetian aspect, with 
a piazza and a campanile and a Palladian cathe- 
dral, surrounded on all sides by lofty hills. We 
144 


ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 

were at the end of the railway and at the be- 
ginning of the Dolomites. 

Although I have a constitutional aversion to 
scientific information given by unscientific per- 
sons, such as clergymen and men of letters, I 
must go in that direction far enough to make it 
clear that the word Dolomite does not describe 
a kind of fossil, nor a sect of heretics, but a 
formation of mountains lying between the Alps 
and the Adriatic. Draw a diamond on the 
map, with Brixen at the northwest corner, 
Lienz at the northeast, Belluno at the southeast, 
and Trent at the southwest, and you will have 
included the region of the Dolomites, a country 
so picturesque, so interesting, so full of sublime 
and beautiful scenery, that it is equally a won- 
der and a blessing that it has not been long since 
completely overrun by tourists and ruined with 
railways. It is true, the glaciers and snow- 
fields are limited; the waterfalls are compara- 
tively few and slender, and the rivers small; 
the loftiest peaks are little more than ten thou- 
sand feet high. But, on the other hand, the 
mountains are always near, and therefore al- 
ways imposing. Bold, steep, fantastic masses 
of naked rock, they rise suddenly from the green 
and flowery valleys in amazing and endless 
contrast; they mirror themselves in the tiny 
mountain lakes like pictures in a dream. 

I believe the guide-book says that they are 
145 


LITTLE RIVERS 


formed of carbonate of lime and carbonate of 
magnesia in chemical composition; but even if 
this be true, it need not prejudice any candid 
observer against them. For the simple and 
fortunate fact is that they are built of such 
stone that wind and weather, keen frost and 
melting snow and rushing water have worn and 
cut and carved them into a thousand shapes of 
wonder and beauty. It needs but little fancy 
to see in them walls and towers, cathedrals and 
campaniles, fortresses and cities, tinged with 
many hues from pale gray to deep red, and 
shining in an air so soft, so pure, so cool, so 
fragrant, under a sky so deep and blue and a 
sunshine so genial, that it seems like the happy 
union of Switzerland and Italy. 

The great highway through this region from 
south to north is the Ampezzo road, which was 
constructed in 1830, along the valleys of the 
Piave, the Boite, and the Rienz — the ancient 
line of travel and commerce between Venice and 
Innsbruck. The road is superbly built, smooth 
and level. Our carriage rolled along so easily 
that we forgot and forgave its venerable ap- 
pearance and its lack of accommodation for 
trunks. We had been persuaded to take four 
horses, as our luggage seemed too formidable 
for a single pair. But in effect our concession 
to apparent necessity turned out to be a mere 
display of superfluous luxury, for the two white 
146 


ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 

leaders did little more than show their feeble 
paces, leaving the gray wheelers to do the 
work. We had the elevating sense of travelling 
four-in-hand, however — a satisfaction to which 
I do not believe any human being is altogether 
insensible. 

At Longarone we breakfasted for the second 
time, and entered the narrow gorge of the Piave. 
The road was cut out of the face of the rock. 
Below us the long lumber-rafts went shooting 
down the swift river. Above, on the right, 
were the jagged crests of Monte Furlon and 
Premaggiore, which seemed to us very wonder- 
ful, because we had not yet learned how jagged 
the Dolomites can be. At Perarolo, where the 
Boite joins the Piave, there is a lump of a moun- 
tain in the angle between the rivers, and around 
this we crawled in long curves until we had 
risen a thousand feet, and arrived at the same 
Hotel Venezia, where we were to dine. 

While dinner was preparing, the Deacon and 
I walked up to Pieve di Cadore, the birthplace 
of Titian. The house in which the great painter 
first saw the colours of the world is still stand- 
ing, and tradition points out the very room in 
which he began to paint. I am not one of those 
who would inquire too closely into such a 
legend as this. The cottage may have been 
rebuilt a dozen times since Titian’s day; not a 
scrap of the original stone or plaster may re- 
147 


LITTLE RIVERS 


main; but beyond a doubt the view that we 
saw from the window is the same that Titian 
saw. Now, for the first time, I could under- 
stand and appreciate the landscape-backgrounds 
of his pictures. The compact masses of moun- 
tains, the bold, sharp forms, the hanging rocks 
of cold gray emerging from green slopes, the 
intense blue aerial distances — ^these all had 
seemed to be unreal and imaginary — composi- 
tions of the studio. But now I knew that, 
whether Titian painted out-of-doors, like our 
modern impressionists, or not, he certainly 
painted what he had seen, and painted it as it is. 

The graceful brown-eyed boy who showed us 
the house seemed also to belong to one of 
Titian’s pictures. As we were going away, the 
Deacon, for lack of copper, rewarded him with 
a little silver piece, a half-lira, in value about 
ten cents. A celestial rapture of surprise spread 
over the child’s face, and I know not what bless- 
ings he invoked upon us. He called his com- 
panions to rejoice with him, and we left them 
clapping their hands and dancing. 

Driving after one has dined has always a 
peculiar charm. The motion seems pleasanter, 
the landscape finer than in the morning hours. 
The road from Cadore ran on a high level, 
through sloping pastures, white villages, and 
bits of larch forest. In its narrow bed, far be- 
low, the river Boite roared as gently as Bottom’s 
148 


ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 

lion. The afternoon sunlight touched the snow- 
capped pinnacle of Antelao and the massive 
pink wall of Sorapis on the right; on the left, 
across the valley, Monte Pelmo’s vast head and 
the wild crests of La Rochetta and Formin rose 
dark against the glowing sky. The peasants 
lifted their hats as we passed, and gave us a 
pleasant evening greeting. And so, almost 
without knowing it, we slipped out of Italy into 
Austria, and drew up before a bare, square stone 
building with the double black eagle, like a 
strange fowl split for broiling, staring at us 
from the wall, and an inscription to the effect 
that this was the Royal and Imperial Austrian 
Custom-house. 

The oflScer saluted us so politely that we felt 
quite sorry that his duty required him to dis- 
turb our luggage. ‘‘The law obliged him to 
open one trunk; courtesy forbade him to open 
more.” It was quickly done; and, without 
having to make any contribution to the income 
of His Royal and Imperial Majesty, Francis 
Joseph, we rolled on our way, through the ham- 
lets of Acqua Bona and Zuel, into the Ampezzan 
metropolis of Cortina, at sundown. 

The modest inn called “The Star of Gold” 
stood facing the public square, just below the 
church, and the landlady stood facing us in the 
doorway, with an enthusiastic welcome — ^alto- 
gether a most friendly and entertaining land- 
149 


LITTLE KIVERS 


lady, whose one desire in life seemed to be that 
we should never regret having chosen her house 
instead of “The White Cross,’’ or “The Black 
Eagle.” 

“O ja!” she had our telegram received; and 
would we look at the rooms ? Outlooking on the 
piazza, with a balcony from which we could ob- 
serve the Festa of to-morrow. She hoped they 
would please us. ‘"Only come in; accommodate 
yourselves.” 

It was all as she promised; three little bed- 
rooms, and a little salon opening on a little 
balcony; queer old oil-paintings and framed 
embroideries and tiles hanging on the walls; 
spotless curtains, and board floors so white that 
it would have been a shame to eat off them 
without spreading a cloth to keep them from 
being soiled. 

“These are the rooms of the Baron Roths- 
child when he comes here always in the summer 
— ^with nine horses and nine servants — ^the Baron 
Rothschild of Vienna.” 

I assured her that we did not know the Baron, 
but that should make no difference. We would 
not ask her to reduce the price on account of a 
little thing like that. 

She did not quite grasp this idea, but hoped 
that we would not find the pension too dear at 
a dollar and fifty-seven and a half cents a day 
each, with a little extra for the salon and the 
150 


ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 


balcony. ‘‘The English people all please them- 
selves here — ^there comes many every summer — 
English Bishops and their families.” 

I inquired whether there were many Bishops 
in the house at that moment. 

“No, just at present — ^she was very sorry — 
none.” 

“Well, then,” I said, “it is all right. We 
will take the rooms.” 

Good Signora Barbaria, you did not speak 
the American language, nor understand those 
curious perversions of thought which pass among 
the Americans for humour; but you understood 
how to make a little inn cheerful and home-like; 
yours was a very simple and agreeable art of 
keeping a hotel. As we sat in the balcony after 
supper, listening to the capital playing of the 
village orchestra, and the Tyrolese songs with 
which they varied their music, we thought 
within ourselves that we were fortunate to have 
fallen upon the Star of Gold. 

II 

Cortina lies in its valley like a white shell 
that has rolled down into a broad vase of mala- 
chite. It has about a hundred houses and seven 
hundred inhabitants, a large church and two 
small ones, a fine stone campanile with excellent 
bells, and seven or eight little inns. But it is 
151 


LITTLE RIVERS 

more important than its size would signify, for 
it is the capital of the district whose lawful title 
is Magnifica Comunita di Ampezzo — ^a name con- 
ferred long ago by the Republic of Venice. In 
the fifteenth century it was Venetian territory; 
but in 1516, under Maximilian I., it was joined 
to Austria; and it is now one of the richest and 
most prosperous communes of the Tyrol. It 
embraces about thirty-five hundred people, 
scattered in hamlets and clusters of houses 
through the green basin with its four entrances, 
lying between the peaks of Tofana, Cristallo, 
Sorapis, and Nuvolau. The well-cultivated 
grain fields and meadows, the smooth grassy 
alps filled with fine cattle, the well-built houses 
with their white stone basements and balconies 
of dark brown wood and broad overhanging 
roofs, all speak of industry and thrift. But there 
is more than mere agricultural prosperity in this 
valley. There is a fine race of men and women 
— ^intelligent, vigorous, and with a strong sense 
of beauty. The outer walls of the annex of the 
Hotel Aquila Nera are covered with frescoes 
of marked power and originality, painted by 
the son of the innkeeper. The art schools of 
Cortina are famous for their beautiful work in 
gold and silver filigree, and wood-inlaying. 
There are nearly two hundred pupils in these 
schools, all peasants’ children, and they produce 
results, especially in intarsia, which are admira- 
15 ^ 


ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 

ble. The village orchestra, of which I spoke a 
moment ago, is trained and led by a peasant’s 
son, who has never had a thorough musical edu- 
cation. It must have at least twenty-five mem- 
bers, and as we heard them at the Festa they 
seemed to play with extraordinary accuracy and 
expression. 

This Festa gave us a fine chance to see the 
people of the Ampezzo all together. It was the 
annual jubilation of the district; and from all 
the outlying hamlets and remote side valleys, 
even from the neighbouring vales of Agordo and 
Auronzo, across the mountains, and from Ca- 
dore, the peasants, men and women and chil- 
dren, had come in to the Sagro at Cortina. The 
piazza — ^which is really nothing more than a 
broadening of the road behind the church — 
was quite thronged. There must have been 
between two and three thousand people. 

The ceremonies of the day began with gen- 
eral church-going. The people here are hon- 
estly and naturally religious. I have seen so 
many examples of what can only be called ‘^sin- 
cere and unaffected piety,” that I cannot doubt 
it. The church, on Cortina’s feast-day, was 
crowded to the doors with worshippers, who 
gave every evidence of taking part not only 
with the voice, but also with the heart, in the 
worship. 

Then followed the public unveiling of a tab- 
153 


LITTLE RIVERS 


let, on the wall of the little Inn of the Anchor, 
to the memory of Giammaria Ghedini, the 
founder of the art-schools of Cortina. There 
was music by the band; and an oration by a 
native Demosthenes (who spoke in Italian so 
fluent that it ran through one’s senses like water 
through a sluice, leaving nothing behind), and 
an original Canto sung by the village choir, with 
a general chorus, in which they called upon the 
various mountains to ‘‘reecho the name of the 
beloved master John-Mary as a model of mod- 
esty and true merit,” and wound up with — 

Hurrah for John-Mary ! Hurrah for his art I 
Hurrah for all teachers as skilful as he / 

Hurrah for us all, who have now taken 'part 
In singing together in do . . re . . mi.” 

It was very primitive, and I do not suppose 
that the celebration was even mentioned in the 
newspapers of the great world; but, after all, 
has not the man who wins such a triumph as 
this in the hearts of his own people, for whom 
he has made labour beautiful with the charm 
of art, deserved better of fame than many a 
crowned monarch or conquering warrior.?^ We 
should be wiser if we gave less glory to the men 
who have been successful in forcing their fellow- 
men to die, and more glory to the men who 
have been successful in teaching their fellow- 
men how to live. 

But the Festa of Cortina did not remain all 
. 154 


ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 

day on this high moral plane. In the afternoon 
came what our landlady called ''allerlei Dumm- 
heitenr There was a grand lottery for the 
benefit of the Volunteer Fire Department. The 
high oflScials sat up in a green wooden booth in 
the middle of the square, and called out the 
numbers and distributed the prizes. Then there 
was a greased pole with various articles of an 
attractive character tied to a large hoop at the 
top — silk aprons, and a green jacket, and bot- 
tles of wine, and half a smoked pig, and a coil 
of rope, and a purse. The gallant firemen vol- 
untarily climbed up the pole as far as they 
could, one after another, and then involuntarily 
slid down again exhausted, each one wiping off 
a little more of the grease, until at last the 
lucky one came who profited by his forerunners’ 
labours, and struggled to the top to snatch the 
smoked pig. After that it was easy. 

Such is success in this unequal world; the 
man who wipes off the grease seldom gets the 
prize. 

Then followed various games, with tubs of 
water; and coins stuck to the bottom of a huge 
black frying-pan, to be plucked off with the 
lips; and pots of flour to be broken with sticks; 
so that the young lads of the village were ducked 
and blackened and powdered to an unlimited 
extent, amid the hilarious applause of the spec- 
tators. In the evening there was more music, 
and the peasants danced in the square, the 
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LITTLE RIVERS 


women quietly and rather heavily, but the men 
with amazing agility, slapping the soles of their 
shoes with their hands, or turning cart-wheels 
in front of their partners. At dark the festivi- 
ties closed with a display of fireworks; there 
were rockets and bombs and pin-wheels; and 
the boys had tiny red and blue lights which 
they held until their fingers were burned, just 
as boys do in America; and there was a general 
hush of wonder as a particularly brilliant rocket 
swished into the dark sky; and when it burst 
into a rain of serpents, the crowd breathed out 
its delight in a long-drawn ‘"Ah-h-h-h !” just as 
the crowd does everywhere. We might easily 
have imagined ourselves at a Fourth of July 
celebration in Vermont, if it had not been for 
the costumes. 

The men of the Ampezzo Valley have kept 
but little that is peculiar in their dress. Men 
are naturally more progressive than women, and 
therefore less picturesque. The tide of fashion 
has swept them into the international monotony 
of coat and vest and trousers — ^pretty much the 
same, and equally ugly, all over the world. 
Now and then you may see a short jacket with 
silver buttons, or a pair of knee-breeches tied 
with ribbons; and almost all the youths wear a 
bunch of feathers or a tuft of chamois’ hair in 
their soft green hats. But the women of the 
Ampezzo — strong, comely, with golden brown 
complexions, and often noble faces — are not 
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ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 


ashamed to dress as their grandmothers did. 
They wear a little round black felt hat with 
rolled rim and two long ribbons hanging down 
at the back. Their hair is carefully braided 
and coiled, and stuck through and through 
with great silver pins. A black bodice, fastened 
with silver clasps, is covered in front with the 
ends of a brilliant silk kerchief, laid in many 
folds around the shoulders. The white chemise- 
sleeves are very full and fastened up above the 
elbow with coloured ribbon. If the weather is 
cool, the women wear a short black jacket, with 
satin yoke and high puffed sleeves. But, what- 
ever the weather may be, they make no change 
in the large, full dark skirts, almost completely 
covered with immense silk aprons, by prefer- 
ence light blue. It is not a remarkably brilliant 
dress, compared with that which one may still 
see in some districts of Norway or Sweden, but 
upon the whole it suits the women of the Am- 
pezzo wonderfully. 

For my part, I think that when a woman has 
found a dress that becomes her, it is a waste of 
time to send to Paris for a fashion-plate. 

Ill 

When the excitement of the Festa had sub- 
sided, we were free to abandon ourselves to the 
excursions in which the neighbourhood of Cor- 
tina abounds, and to which the guide-book earn- 
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estly calls every right-minded traveller. A walk 
through the light-green shadows of the larch- 
woods to the tiny lake of Ghedina, where we 
could see all the four dozen trout swimming 
about in the clear water and catching flies; a 
drive to the Belvedere, where there are super- 
ficial refreshments above and profound grottos 
below; these were trifles, though we enjoyed 
them. But the great mountains encircling us 
on every side, standing out in clear view with 
that distinctness and completeness of vision 
which is one charm of the Dolomites, seemed to 
summon us to more arduous enterprises. Ac- 
cordingly, the Deacon and I selected the easiest 
one, engaged a guide, and prepared for the 
ascent. 

Monte Nuvolau is not a perilous mountain. I 
am quite sure that at my present time of life I 
should be unwilling to ascend a perilous moun- 
tain unless there were something extraordinarily 
desirable at the top, or remarkably disagreeable 
at the bottom. Mere risk has lost the attrac- 
tions which it once had. As the father of a 
family I felt bound to abstain from going for 
amusement into any place which a Christian 
lady might not visit with propriety and safety. 
Our preparation for Nuvolau, therefore, did not 
consist of ropes, ice-irons, and axes, but simply 
of a lunch and two long sticks. 

Our way led us, in the early morning, through 
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ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 


the clustering houses of Lacedel, up the broad, 
green slope that faces Cortina on the west, to 
the beautiful Alp Pocol. Nothing could exceed 
the pleasure of such a walk in the cool of the 
day, while the dew still lies on the short, rich 
grass, and the myriads of flowers are at their 
brightest and sweetest. The infinite variety 
and abundance of the blossoms is a continual 
wonder. They are sown more thickly than the 
stars in heaven, and the rainbow itself does not 
show so many tints. Here they are mingled 
like the threads of some strange embroidery; 
and there again nature has massed her colours; 
so that one spot will be all pale blue with in- 
numerable forget-me-nots, or dark blue with 
gentians; another will blush with the delicate 
pink of the Santa Lucia or the deeper red of the 
clover; and another will shine yellow as cloth 
of gold. Over all this opulence of bloom the 
larks were soaring and singing. I never heard 
so many as in the meadows about Cortina. 
There was always a sweet spray of music sprink- 
ling down out of the sky, where the singers 
poised unseen. It was like walking through a 
shower of melody. 

From the Alp Pocol, which is simply a fair, 
lofty pasture, we had our first full view of 
Nuvolau, rising bare and strong, like a huge 
bastion, from the dark fir-woods. Through 
these our way led onward now for seven miles, 
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LITTLE RIVERS 


with but a slight ascent. Then turning off to 
the left we began to climb sharply through the 
forest. There we found abundance of the lovely 
Alpenrosen, which do not bloom on the lower 
ground. Their colour is a deep, glowing pink, 
and when a Tyrolese girl gives you one of these 
flowers to stick in the band of your hat, you 
may know that you have found favour in her 
eyes. 

Through the wood the cuckoo was calling — 
the bird which reverses the law of good chil- 
dren, and insists on being heard, but not seen. 

When the forest was at an end we found our- 
selves at the foot of an alp which sloped steeply 
up to the Five Towers of Averau. The effect 
of these enormous masses of rock, standing out 
in lonely grandeur, like the ruins of some for- 
saken habitation of giants, was tremendous. 
Seen from far below in the valley their form was 
picturesque and striking; but as we sat beside 
the clear, cold spring which gushes out at the 
foot of the largest tower, the Titanic rocks 
seemed to hang in the air above us as if they 
would overawe us into a sense of their majesty. 
We felt it to the full; yet none the less, but 
rather the more, could we feel at the same time 
the delicate and ethereal beauty of the fringed 
gentianella and the pale Alpine lilies scattered 
on the short turf beside us. 

We had now been on foot about three hours 
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ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 

and a half. The half hour that remained was 
the hardest. Up over loose, broken stones that 
rolled beneath our feet, up over great slopes of 
rough rock, up across little fields of snow where 
we paused to celebrate the Fourth of July with 
a brief snowball fight, up along a narrowing 
ridge with a precipice on either hand, and so at 
last to the summit, 8600 feet above the sea. 

It is not a great height, but it is a noble 
situation. For Nuvolau is fortunately placed 
in the very centre of the Dolomites, and so 
commands a finer view than many a higher 
mountain. Indeed, it is not from the highest 
peaks, according to my experience, that one 
gets the grandest prospects, but rather from 
those of middle height, which are so isolated 
as to give a wide circle of vision, and from which 
one can see both the valleys and the summits. 
Monte Rosa itself gives a less imposing view 
than the Gorner Grat. 

It is possible, in this world, to climb too high 
for pleasure. 

But what a panorama Nuvolau gave us on 
that clear, radiant summer morning — a perfect 
circle of splendid sight ! On one side we looked 
down upon the Five Towers; on the other, a 
thousand feet below, the grassy alps, dotted 
with the huts of the herdsmen, sloped down 
into the deep-cut vale of Agordo. Opposite to 
us was the enormous mass of Tofana, a pile of 
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LITTLE RIVERS 

gray and pink and saffron rock. When we 
turned the other way, we faced a group of 
mountains as ragged as the crests of a line of 
fir-trees, and behind them loomed the solemn 
head of Pelmo. Across the broad vale of the 
Boite, Antelao stood beside Sorapis, like a cam- 
panile beside a cathedral, and Cristallo towered 
above the green pass of the Three Crosses. 
Through that opening we could see the bristling 
peaks of the Sextenthal. Sweeping around in a 
wider circle from that point, we saw, beyond the 
Durrenstein, the snow-covered pile of the Gross- 
Glockner; the crimson bastions of the Roth wand 
appeared to the north, behind Tofana; then the 
white slopes that hang far away above the Ziller- 
thal; and, nearer, the Geislerspitze, like five 
fingers thrust into the air; behind that, the dis- 
tant Oetzthaler Mountain, and just a single 
white glimpse of the highest peak of the Ortler 
by the Engadine; nearer still we saw the vast 
fortress of the Sella group and the red combs 
of the Rosengarten; Monte Marmolata, the 
Queen of the Dolomites, stood before us revealed 
from base to peak in a bridal dress of snow; and 
southward we looked into the dark rugged face 
of La Civetta, rising sheer out of the vale of 
Agordo, where the Lake of Alleghe slept un- 
seen. It was a sea of mountains, tossed around 
us into a myriad of motionless waves, and with 
a rainbow of colours spread among their hol- 
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ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 


lows and across their crests. The cliffs of rose 
and orange and silver gray, the valleys of deep- 
est green, the distant shadows of purple and 
melting blue, and the dazzling white of the scat- 
tered snow-fields seemed to shift and vary like 
the hues on the inside of a shell. And over all, 
from peak to peak, the light, feathery clouds 
went drifting lazily and slowly, as if they could 
not leave a scene so fair. 

There is barely room on the top of Nuvolau 
for the stone shelter-hut which a grateful Saxon 
baron has built there as a sort of votive offering 
for the recovery of his health among the moun- 
tains. As we sat within and ate our frugal 
lunch, we were glad that he had recovered his 
health, and glad that he had built the hut, and 
glad that we had come to it. In fact, we could 
almost sympathise in our cold, matter-of-fact 
American way with the sentimental German in- 
scription which we read on the wall: — 

Von Nuvolau^ s hohen Wolkenstufen 

Lass michy Natur, durch deine Himmel rufen — 

An deiner Brust gesunde, wer da krank ! 

So wird zum Volkerdank mein Sachsendank. 

We refrained, however, from shouting any- 
thing through Nature’s heaven, but went lightly 
down, in about three hours, to supper in the 
Star of Gold. 


163 


LITTLE RIVERS 


IV 

When a stern necessity forces one to leave 
Cortina, there are several ways of departure. 
We selected the main highway for our trunks, 
but for ourselves the Pass of the Three Crosses; 
the Deacon and the Deaconess in a mountain 
waggon, and I on foot. It should be written 
as an axiom in the philosophy of travel that the 
easiest way is best for your luggage, and the 
hardest way is best for yourself. 

All along the rough road up to the Pass, we 
had a glorious outlook backward over the Val 
d’ Ampezzo, and when we came to the top, we 
looked deep down into the narrow Val Buona 
behind Sorapis. I do not know just when we 
passed the Austrian border, but when we came 
to Lake Misurina we found ourselves in Italy 
again. My friends went on down the valley to 
Landro, but I in my weakness, having eaten of 
the trout of the lake for dinner, could not re- 
sist the temptation of staying over-night to 
catch one for breakfast. 

It was a pleasant failure. The lake was 
beautiful, lying on top of the mountain like a 
bit of blue sky, surrounded by the peaks of 
Cristallo, Cadino, and the Drei Zinnen. It was 
a happiness to float on such celestial waters and 
cast the hopeful fly. The trout were there; 
they were large; I saw them; they also saw me; 

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ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 

but, alas ! I could not raise them. Misurina is, 
in fact, what the Scotch call “a dour loch,” one 
of those places which are outwardly beautiful, 
but inwardly so demoralised that the trout will 
not rise. 

When we came ashore in the evening, the 
boatman consoled me with the story of a French 
count who had spent two weeks there fishing, 
and only caught one fish. I had some thoughts 
of staying thirteen days longer, to rival the 
count, but concluded to go on the next morn- 
ing, over Monte Pian and the Cat’s Ladder to 
Landro. 

The view from Monte Pian is far less exten- 
sive than that from Nuvolau; but it has the 
advantage of being very near the wild jumble 
of the Sexten Dolomites. The Three Shoe- 
makers and a lot more of sharp and ragged 
fellows are close by, on the east; on the west, 
Cristallo shows its fine little glacier, and Roth- 
wand its crimson cliffs; and southward Misu- 
rina gives to the view a glimpse of water, with- 
out which, indeed, no view is complete. More- 
over, the mountain has the merit of being, as 
its name implies, quite gentle. I met the 
Deacon and the Deaconess at the top, they 
having walked up from Landro. And so we 
crossed the boundary line together again, seven 
thousand feet above the sea, from Italy into 
Austria. There was no custom-house. 

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LITTLE RIVERS 


The way down, by the Cat’s Ladder, I trav- 
elled alone. The path was very steep and little 
worn, but even on the mountain-side there was 
no danger of losing it, for it had been blazed 
here and there, on trees and stones, with a dash 
of blue paint. This is the work of the invalu- 
able DOAV — ^which is, being interpreted, the 
German-Austrian Alpine Club. The more one 
travels in the mountains, the more one learns 
to venerate this beneficent society, for the shel- 
ter-huts and guide-posts it has erected, and the 
paths it has made and marked distinctly with 
various colours. The Germans have a genius for 
thoroughness. My little brown guide-book, for 
example, not only informed me through whose 
back yard I must go to get into a certain path, 
but it told me that in such and such a spot I 
should find quite a good deal {ziemlichviel) of 
Edelweiss, and in another a small echo; it ad- 
vised me in one valley to take provisions and 
dispense with a guide, and in another to take a 
guide and dispense with provisions, adding 
varied information in regard to beer, which in 
my case was useless, for I could not touch it. 
To go astray under such auspices would be 
worse than inexcusable. 

Landro we found a very different place from 
Cortina. Instead of having a large church and 
a number of small hotels, it consists entirely of 
one large hotel and a very tiny church. It does 
not lie in a broad, open basin, but in a narrow 
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ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 


valley, shut in closely by the mountains. The 
hotel, in spite of its size, is excellent, and a few 
steps up the valley is one of the finest views in 
the Dolomites. To the east opens a deep, wild 
gorge, at the head of which the pinnacles of the 
Drei Zinnen are seen; to the south Diirrensee 
fills the valley from edge to edge, and reflects 
in its pale waters the huge bulk of Monte Cris- 
tallo. It is such a complete picture, so finished, 
so compact, so balanced, that one might think 
a painter had composed it in a moment of in- 
spiration. But no painter ever laid such col- 
ours on his canvas as those which are seen here 
when the cool evening shadows have settled 
upon the valley, all gray and green, while the 
mountains shine above in rosy Alpenglow, as if 
transfigured with inward fire. 

There is another lake, about three miles 
north of Landro, called the Toblacher See, and 
there I repaired the defeat of Misurina. The 
trout at the outlet, by the bridge, were very 
small, and while the old fisherman was endeav- 
ouring to catch some of them in his new net, 
which would not work, I pushed my boat up 
to the head of the lake, where the stream came 
in. The green water was amazingly clear, but 
the current kept the fish with their heads up 
stream; so that one could come up behind them 
near enough for a long cast, without being seen. 
As my fly lighted above them and came gently 
down with the ripple, I saw the first fish turn 


LITTLE RIVERS 


and rise and take it. A motion of the wrist 
hooked him, and he played just as gamely as 
a trout in my favourite Long Island pond. 
How different the colour, though, as he came out 
of the water. This fellow was all silvery, with 
light pink spots on his sides. I took seven of 
his companions, in weight some four pounds, 
and then stopped because the evening light was 
failing. 

How pleasant it is to fish in such a place and 
at such an hour! The novelty of the scene, 
the grandeur of the landscape, lend a strange 
charm to the sport. But the sport itself is so 
familiar that one feels at home — ^the motion of 
the rod, the feathery swish of the line, the sight 
of the rising fish — ^it all brings back a hundred 
woodland memories, and thoughts of good fishing 
comrades, some far away across the sea, and, 
perhaps, even now sitting around the forest 
camp-fire in Maine or Canada, and some with 
whom we shall keep company no more until 
we cross the greater ocean into that happy 
country whither they have preceded us. 

V 

Instead of going straight down the valley by 
the high road, a drive of an hour, to the rail- 
way in the Pusterthal, I walked up over the 
mountains to the east, across the Platzwiesen, 
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ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 


and so down through the Pragserthal. In one 
arm of the deep fir-clad vale are the Baths of 
Alt-Prags, famous for having cured the Coun- 
tess of Gdrz of a violent rheumatism in the 
fifteenth century. It is an antiquated estab- 
lishment, and the guests, who were walking 
about in the fields or drinking their coffee in 
the balcony, had a fifteenth century look about 
them — ^venerable but slightly ruinous. But per- 
haps that was merely a rheumatic result. 

All the waggons in the place were engaged. 
It is strange what an aggravating effect this 
state of affairs has upon a pedestrian who is 
bent upon riding. I did not recover my delight 
in the scenery until I had walked about five 
miles farther, and sat down on the grass, be- 
side a beautiful spring, to eat my lunch. 

What is there in a little physical rest that has 
such magic to restore the sense of pleasure ? A 
few moments ago nothing pleased you — ^the 
bloom was gone from the peach; but now it has 
come back again — you wonder and admire. 
Thus cheerful and contented I trudged up the 
right arm of the valley to the Baths of Neu- 
Prags, less venerable, but apparently more popu- 
lar than Alt-Prags, and on beyond them, through 
the woods, to the superb Pragser-Wildsee, a 
lake whose still waters, now blue as sapphire 
under the clear sky, and now green as emerald 
under gray clouds, sleep encircled by mighty 
169 


LITTLE RIVERS 


precipices. Could anything be a greater con- 
trast with Venice ? There the canals alive with 
gondolas, and the open harbour bright with 
many-coloured sails; here, the hidden lake, silent 
and lifeless, save when 

leaping fish 

Sends through the tarn a lonely cheer. 

Tired, and a little foot-sore, after nine hours’ 
walking, I came into the big railway hotel at 
Toblach that night. There I met my friends 
again, and parted from them and the Dolomites 
the next day, with regret. For they were 
‘"stepping westward;” but in order to get to 
the Gross- Venediger I must make a detour to 
the east, through the Pusterthal, and come up 
through the valley of the Isel to the great chain 
of mountains called the Hohe Tauern. 

At the junction of the Isel and the Drau lies 
the quaint little city of Lienz, with its two 
castles — ^the square, double-towered one in the 
town, now transformed into the offices of the 
municipality, and the huge mediaeval one on a 
hill outside, now used as a damp restaurant and 
dismal beer-cellar. I lingered at Lienz for a 
couple of days, in the ancient hostelry of the 
Post. The hallways were vaulted like a cloister, 
the walls were three feet thick, the kitchen was 
in the middle of the house on the second floor, 
so that I looked into it every time I came from 
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ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 


my room, and ordered dinner direct from the 
cook. But, so far from being displeased with 
these peculiarities, I rather liked the flavour of 
them; and then, in addition, the landlady’s 
daughter, who was managing the house, was a 
person of most engaging manners, and there 
was trout and grayling Ashing in a stream near 
by, and the neighbouring church of Dolsach 
contained the beautiful picture of the Holy 
Family, which Franz Defregger painted for his 
native village. 

The peasant women of Lienz have one very 
striking feature in their dress — a black felt hat 
with a broad, stiff brim and a high crown, 
smaller at the top than at the base. It looks 
a little like the traditional head-gear of the 
Pilgrim Fathers, exaggerated. There is a so- 
lemnity about it which is fatal to feminine 
beauty. 

I went by the post-waggon, with two slow 
horses and ten passengers, flfteen miles up the 
Iselthal, to Windisch-Matrei, a village whose 
early history is lost in the mist of antiquity, 
and whose streets are pervaded with odours 
which must have originated at the same time 
with the village. One wishes that they also 
might have shared the fate of its early history. 
But it is not fair to expect too much of a small 
place, and Windisch-Matrei has certainly a 
beautiful situation and a good inn. There I 
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LITTLE RIVERS 


took my guide — a wiry and companionable 
little man, whose occupation in the lower world 
was that of a maker and merchant of hats — ^and 
set out for the Pragerhiitte, a shelter on the side 
of the Gross- Venediger. 

The path led under the walls of the old Castle 
of Weissenstein, and then in steep curves up 
the cliff which blocks the head of the valley, 
and along a cut in the face of the rock, into the 
steep, narrow Tauernthal, which divides the 
Glockner group from the Venediger. How en- 
tirely different it was from the region of the 
Dolomites ! There the variety of colour was 
endless and the change incessant; here it was 
all green grass and trees and black rocks, with 
glimpses of snow. There the highest mountains 
were in sight constantly; here they could only 
be seen from certain points in the valley. There 
the streams played but a small part in the land- 
scape; here they were prominent, the main river 
raging and foaming through the gorge below, 
while a score of waterfalls leaped from the cliffs 
on either side and dashed down to join it. 

The peasants, men, women and children, were 
cutting the grass in the almost perpendicular 
fields; the woodmen were trimming and felling 
the trees in the fir-forests; the cattle-tenders 
were driving their cows along the stony path, 
or herding them far up on the hillsides. It was 
a lonely scene, and yet a busy one; and all along 
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the road was written the history of the perils 
and hardships of the life which now seemed so 
peaceful and picturesque under the summer 
sunlight. 

These heavy crosses, each covered with a 
narrow, pointed roof and decorated with a rude 
picture, standing beside the path, or on the 
bridge, or near the mill — ^what do they mean.^ 
They mark the place where a human life has 
been lost, or where some poor peasant has been 
delivered from a great peril, and has set up a 
memorial of his gratitude. 

Stop, traveller, as you pass by, and look at 
the pictures. They have little more of art than 
a child’s drawing on a slate; but they will teach 
you what it means to earn a living in these 
mountains. They tell of the danger that lurks 
on the steep slopes of grass, where the mowers 
have to go down with ropes around their waists, 
and in the beds of the streams where the floods 
sweep through in the spring, and in the forests 
where the great trees fall and crush men like 
flies, and on the icy bridges where a slip is fatal, 
and on the high passes where the winter snow- 
storm blinds the eyes and benumbs the limbs of 
the traveller, and under the cliffs from which 
avalanches slide and rocks roll. They show 
you men and women falling from waggons, and 
swept away by waters, and overwhelmed in 
landslips. In the corner of the picture you may 
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LITTLE RIVERS 


see a peasant with the black cross above his 
head — that means death. Or perhaps it is de- 
liverance that the tablet commemorates — ^and 
then you will see the miller kneeling beside his 
mill with a flood rushing down upon it, or a 
peasant kneeling in his harvest-field under an 
inky-black cloud, or a landlord beside his inn 
in flames, or a mother praying beside her sick 
children; and above appears an angel, or a 
saint, or the Virgin with her Child. 

Read the inscriptions, too, in their quaint 
German. Some of them are as humourous as 
the epitaphs in New England graveyards. I 
remember one which ran like this: 

Here lies Elias Queer, 

Killed in his sixtieth year ; 

Scarce had he seen the light of day 

When a waggon-wheel crushed his life away. 

And there is another famous one which says: 

Here perished the honoured and virtuous 
maiden, 

G, V. 

This tablet was erected by her only son. 

But for the most part a glance at these Mar- 
terl und Taferl, which are so frequent on all the 
mountain-roads of the Tyrol, will give you a 
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strange sense of the real pathos of human life. 
If you are a Catholic, you will not refuse their 
request to say a prayer for the departed; if 
you are a Protestant, at least it will not hurt 
you to say one for those who still live and suffer 
and toil among such dangers. 

After we had walked for four hours up the 
Tauernthal, we came to the Matreier-Tauern- 
haus, an inn which is kept open all the year for 
the shelter of travellers over the high pass that 
crosses the mountain-range at this point, from 
north to south. There we dined. It was a 
bare, rude place, but the dish of juicy trout was 
garnished with flowers, each fish holding a big 
pansy in its mouth, and as the maid set them 
down before me she wished me “a good appe- 
tite,” with the hearty old-fashioned Tyrolese 
courtesy which still survives in these remote 
valleys. It is pleasant to travel in a land where 
the manners are plain and good. If you meet a 
peasant on the road he says, ‘‘God greet you !” 
if you give a child a couple of kreuzers he folds 
his hands and says, “God reward you!” and 
the maid who lights you to bed says, “Good- 
night, I hope you will sleep well !” 

Two hours more of walking brought us 
through Ausser-gschloss and Inner-gschloss, two 
groups of herdsmen’s huts, tenanted only in 
summer, at the head of the Tauernthal. Mid- 
way between them lies a little chapel, cut into 
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LITTLE RIVERS 


the solid rock for shelter from the avalanches. 
This lofty vale is indeed rightly named; for it is 
shut off from the rest of the world. The portal 
is a cliff down which the stream rushes in foam 
and thunder. On either hand rises a mountain 
wall. Within, the pasture is fresh and green, 
sprinkled with Alpine roses, and the pale river 
flows swiftly down between the rows of dark 
wooden houses. At the head of the vale towers 
the Gross- Venediger, with its glaciers and snow- 
flelds dazzling white against the deep blue 
heaven. The murmur of the stream and the 
tinkle of the cow-bells and the jodelling of the 
herdsmen far up the slopes, make the music for 
the scene. 

The path from Gschloss leads straight up to 
the foot of the dark pyramid of the Kesselkopf, 
and then in steep endless zig-zags along the edge 
of the great glacier. I saw, at first, the pin- 
nacles of ice far above me, breaking over the 
face of the rock; then, after an hour’s breath- 
less climbing, I could look right into the blue 
crevasses; and at last, after another hour over 
soft snow-fields and broken rocks, I was at the 
Pragerhut, perched on the shoulder of the 
mountain, looking down upon the huge river 
of ice. 

It was a magnificent view under the clear 
light of evening. Here in front of us, the Vene- 
diger with all his brother-mountains clustered 
176 


ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 


about him; behind us, across the Tauern, the 
mighty chain of the Glockner against the east- 
ern sky. 

This is the frozen world. Here the Winter, 
driven back into his stronghold, makes his last 
stand against the Summer, in perpetual conflict, 
retreating by day to the mountain-peak, but 
creeping back at night in frost and snow to re- 
gain a little of his lost territory, until at last 
the Summer is wearied out, and the Winter 
sweeps down again to claim the whole valley 
for his own. 

VI 

In the Pragerhut I found mountain comfort. 
There were bunks along the wall of the guest- 
room, with plenty of blankets. There was good 
store of eggs, canned meats, and nourishing 
black bread. The friendly goats came bleating 
up to the door at nightfall to be milked. And 
in charge of all this luxury there was a cheerful 
peasant-wife with her brown-eyed daughter, to 
entertain travellers. It was a pleasant sight to 
see them, as they sat down to their supper with 
my guide; all three bowed their heads and said 
their ‘"grace before meat,” the guide repeating 
the longer prayer and the mother and daughter 
coming in with the responses. I went to bed 
with a warm and comfortable feeling about my 
heart. It was a good ending for the day. In 
177 


LITTLE RIVERS 


the morning, if the weather remained clear, the 
alarm-clock was to wake us at three for the 
ascent to the summit. 

Can it be three o’clock already? The gib- 
bous moon still hangs in the sky and casts a 
feeble light over the scene. Then up and away 
for the final climb ! How rough the path is 
among the black rocks along the ridge ! Now 
we strike out on the gently rising glacier, across 
the crust of snow, picking our way among the 
crevasses, with the rope tied about our waists 
for fear of a fall. How cold it is ! But now 
the gray light of morning dawns, and now the 
beams of sunrise shoot up behind the Glockner, 
and now the sun itself glitters into sight. The 
snow grows softer as we toil up the steep, 
narrow comb between the Gross-Venediger and 
his neighbour the Klein- Venediger. At last we 
have reached our journey’s end. See, the 
whole of the Tyrol is spread out before us in 
wondrous splendour, as we stand on this snowy 
ridge; and at our feet the Schlatten glacier, 
like a long, white snake, curls down into the 
valley. 

There is still a little peak above us; an over- 
hanging horn of snow which the wind has built 
against the mountain-top. I would like to 
stand there, just for a moment. The guide 
protests it would be dangerous, for if the snow 
should break it would be a fall of a thousand 
178 


ALPENROSEN AND GOAT’S MILK 


feet to the glacier on the northern side. But 
let us dare the few steps upward. How our 
feet sink ! Is the snow slipping ? Look at the 
glacier ! What is happening ? It is wrinkling 
and curling backward on us, serpent-like. Its 
head rises far above us. All its icy crests are 
clashing together like the ringing of a thousand 
bells. We are falling ! I fling out my arm to 
grasp the guide — ^and awake to And myself 
clutching a pillow in the bunk. The alarm- 
clock is ringing flercely for three o’clock. A 
driving snow-storm is beating against the win- 
dow. The ground is white. Peer through the 
clouds as I may, I cannot even catch a glimpse 
of the vanished Gross- Venediger. 

1892. 


179 



\ 

I 


AU LARGE 




“ Wherever we strayed, the same tranquil leisure enfolded us ; day fol- 
lowed day in an order unbroken and peaceful as the unfolding of the flowers 
and the silent march of the stars. Time no longer ran like the few sands in 
a delicate hour-glass held by a fragile human hand, but like a majestic 
river fed by fathomless seas. ... We gave ourselves up to the sweet- 
ness of that unmeasured life, without thought of yesterday or to-morrow; 
we drank the cup to-day held to our lips, and knew that so long as we were 
athirst that draught would not be denied us .” — Hamilton W. Mabie: 
Under the Trees. 


AU LARGE 


^^HERE is magic in words, surely, and many 
^ a treasure besides Ali Baba’s is unlocked 
with a verbal key. Some charm in the mere 
sound, some association with the pleasant past, 
touches a secret spring. The bars are down; 
the gate is open; you are made free of all the 
fields of memory and fancy — ^by a word. 

Au large ! Envoy ez au large ! is the cry of 
the Canadian voyageurs as they thrust their 
paddles against the shore and push out on the 
broad lake for a journey through the wilder- 
ness. Au large I is what the man in the bow 
shouts to the man in the stern when the birch 
canoe is running down the rapids, and the water 
grows too broken, and the rocks too thick, along 
the river-bank. Then the frail bark must be 
driven out into the very centre of the wild cur- 
rent, into the midst of danger to find safety, 
dashing, like a frightened colt, along the smooth, 
sloping lane bordered by white fences of foam. 

Au large ! When I hear that word, I hear 
also the crisp waves breaking on pebbly beaches, 
and the big wind rushing through innumerable 
trees, and the roar of headlong rivers leaping 
down the rocks, I see long reaches of water 
183 


LITTLE RIVERS 


sparkling in the sun, or sleeping still between 
evergreen walls beneath a cloudy sky; and the 
gleam of white tents on the shore; and the glow 
of firelight dancing through the woods. I smell 
the delicate vanishing perfume of forest fiowers; 
and the incense of rolls of birch-bark, crinkling 
and flaring in the camp-fire; and the soothing 
odour of balsam-boughs piled deep for wood- 
land beds — ^the veritable and only genuine per- 
fume of the land of Nod. The thin shining veil 
of the Northern lights waves and fades and 
brightens over the night sky; at the sound of 
the word, as at the ringing of a bell, the curtain 
rises. Scene^ the Forest of Arden ; enter a party 
of hunters. 

It was in the Lake St. John country, two 
hundred miles north of Quebec, that I first 
heard my rustic incantation; and it seemed to 
fit the region as if it had been made for it. This 
is not a little pocket wilderness like the Adiron- 
dacks, but something vast and primitive. You 
do not cross it, from one railroad to another, 
by a line of hotels. You go into it by one river 
as far as you like, or dare; and then you turn 
and come back again by another river, making 
haste to get out before your provisions are ex- 
hausted. The lake itself is the cradle of the 
mighty Saguenay: an inland sea, thirty miles 
across and nearly round, lying in the broad 
limestone basin north of the Laurentian Moun- 
184 


AU LARGE 


tains. The southern and eastern shores have 
been settled for twenty or thirty years; and the 
rich farm-land yields abundant crops of wheat 
and oats and potatoes to a community of in- 
dustrious habitants, who live in little modern 
villages, named after the saints and gathered 
as closely as possible around big gray stone 
churches, and thank the good Lord that he has 
given them a climate at least four or five degrees 
milder than Quebec. A railroad, built through 
a region of granite hills, which will never be 
tamed to the plough, links this outlying set- 
tlement to the civilised world; and at the end 
of the railroad the Hotel Roberval, standing on 
a hill above the lake, offers to the pampered 
tourist electric lights, and spring-beds, and a 
wide veranda from which he can look out across 
the water into the face of the wilderness. 

Northward and westward the interminable 
forest rolls away to the shores of Hudson’s Bay 
and the frozen wastes of Labrador. It is an 
immense solitude. A score of rivers empty into 
the lake; little ones like the Pikouabi and La 
Pipe, and middle-sized ones like the Ouiatch- 
ouan and La Belle Riviere, and big ones like 
the Mistassini and the Peribonca; and each of 
these streams is the clue to a labyrinth of woods 
and waters. The canoe-man who follows it far 
enough will find himself among lakes that are 
not named on any map; he will camp on virgin 
185 


LITTLE RIVERS 


ground, and make the acquaintance of unso- 
phisticated fish; perhaps even, like the maiden 
in the fairy-tale, he will meet with the little 
bear, and the middle-sized bear, and the great 
big bear. 

Damon and I set out on such an expedition 
shortly after the nodding lilies in the Connecti- 
cut meadows had rung the noon-tide bell of 
summer, and when the raspberry bushes along 
the line of the Quebec and Lake St. John Rail- 
way had spread their afternoon collation for 
birds and men. At Roberval we found our four 
guides waiting for us, and the steamboat took 
us all across the lake to the Island House, at 
the northeast corner. There we embarked our 
tents and blankets, our pots and pans, and bags 
of flour and potatoes and bacon and other deli- 
cacies, our rods and guns, and last, but not 
least, our axes (without which man in the woods 
is a helpless creature), in two birch-bark canoes, 
and went flying down the Grande Decharge. 

It is a wonderful place, this outlet of Lake 
St. John. All the floods of twenty rivers are 
gathered here, and break forth through a net of 
islands in a double stream, divided by the broad 
He d’Alma into the Grande Decharge and the 
Petite Decharge. The southern outlet is small, 
and flows somewhat more quietly at first. But 
the northern outlet is a huge confluence and 
tumult of waters. You see the set of the tide 
186 


AU LARGE 


far out in the lake, sliding, driving, crowding, 
hurrying in with smooth currents and swirling 
eddies, toward the corner of escape. By the 
rocky cove where the Island House peers out 
through the fir-trees, the current already has a 
perceptible slope. It begins to boil over hidden 
stones in the middle, and gurgles at projecting 
points of rock. A mile farther down there is 
an islet where the stream quickens, chafes, and 
breaks into a rapid. Behind the islet it drops 
down in three or four foaming steps. On the 
outside it makes one long, straight rush into a 
line of white-crested standing waves. 

As we approached, the steersman in the first 
canoe stood up to look over the course. The 
sea was high. Was it too high.^ The canoes 
were heavily loaded. Could they leap the 
waves There was a quick talk among the 
guides as we slipped along, undecided which way 
to turn. Then the question seemed to settle 
itself, as most of these woodland questions do, 
as if some silent force of Nature had the casting- 
vote. '‘Sautez, sautez!'^ cried Ferdinand, en- 
voy ez au larger^ In a moment we were sliding 
down the smooth back of the rapid, directly 
toward the first big wave. The rocky shore 
went by us like a dream; we could feel the motion 
of the earth whirling around with us. The crest 
of the billow in front curled above the bow of 
the , canoe. ^^Arret\ arrei\ doucementV^ A 
187 


LITTLE RIVERS 


swift stroke of the paddle checked the canoe, 
quivering and prancing like a horse suddenly 
reined in. The wave ahead, as if surprised, 
sank and flattened for a second. The canoe 
leaped through the edge of it, swerved to one 
side, and ran gayly down along the fringe of 
the line of billows, into quieter water. 

Every one feels the exhilaration of such a 
descent. I know a lady who almost cried with 
fright when she went down her first rapid, but 
before the voyage was ended she was saying: — 

Count that day lost whose low, descending sun 
Sees no fall leaped, no foaming rapid run^ 

It takes a touch of danger to bring out the joy 
of life. 

Our guides began to shout, and joke each 
other, and praise their canoes. 

‘‘You grazed that villain rock at the corner,” 
said Jean; “did n’t you know where it was.^^” 

“Yes, after I touched it,” cried Ferdinand; 
“but you took in a bucket of water, and I sup- 
pose your m^sievL is sitting on a piece of the 
river. Is it not.^” 

This seemed to us all a very merry jest, and 
we laughed with the same inextinguishable 
laughter which a practical joke, according to 
Homer, always used to raise in Olympus. It is 
one of the charms of life in the woods that it 
brings back the high spirits of boyhood and 
188 


AU LARGE 


renews the youth of the world. Plain fun, like 
plain food, tastes good out-of-doors. Nectar is 
the sweet sap of a maple-tree. Ambrosia is 
only another name for well-turned flapjacks. 
And all the immortals, sitting around the table 
of golden cedar-slabs, make merry when the 
clumsy Hephaistos, playing the part of Hebe, 
stumbles over a root and upsets the plate of 
cakes into the fire. 

The first little rapid of the Grande Decharge 
was only the beginning. Half a mile below we 
could see the river disappear between two points 
of rock. There was a roar of conflict, and a 
golden mist hanging in the air, like the smoke 
of battle. All along the place where the river 
sank from sight, dazzling heads of foam were 
flashing up and falling back, as if a horde of 
water-sprites were vainly trying to fight their 
way up to the lake. It was the top of the 
grande chutes a wild succession of falls and pools 
where no boat could live for a moment. We 
ran down toward it as far as the water served, 
and then turned off among the rocks on the 
left hand, to take the portage. 

These portages are among the troublesome 
delights of a journey in the wilderness. To the 
guides they mean hard work, for everything, 
including the boats, must be carried on their 
backs. The march of the canoes on dry land is 
a curious sight. Andrew Marvell described it 
189 


LITTLE RIVERS 


two hundred years ago when he was poetizing 
beside the little river Wharfe in Yorkshire: — 

And now the salmon-fishers moist 
Their leathern hoots begin to hoists 
And like antipodes in shoes 
Have shod their heads in their canoes. 

How tortoise-like, hut none so slow. 

These rational amphihii go 1'^ 

But the sportsman carries nothing, except per- 
haps his gun, or his rod, or his photographic 
camera; and so for him the portage is only a 
pleasant opportunity to stretch his legs, cramped 
by sitting in the canoe, and to renew his ac- 
quaintance with the pretty things that are in 
the woods. 

We sauntered along the trail, Damon and I, 
as if school were out and would never keep 
again. How fresh and tonic the forest seemed 
as we plunged into its bath of shade. There 
were our old friends the cedars, with their roots 
twisted across the path; and the white birches, 
so trim in youth and so shaggy in age; and the 
sociable spruces and balsams, crowding close 
together, and interlacing their arms overhead. 
There were the little springs, trickling through 
the moss; and the slippery logs laid across the 
marshy places; and the fallen trees, cut in two 
and pushed aside, — ^for this was a much-trav- 
elled portage. 


190 


AU LARGE 


Around the open spaces, the tall meadow-rue 
stood dressed in robes of fairy white and green. 
The blue banners of XhQ fleur-de-lis were planted 
beside the springs. In shady corners, deeper 
in the wood, the fragrant pyrola lifted its scape 
of clustering bells, like a lily of the valley wan- 
dered to the forest. When we came to the end 
of the portage, a perfume like that of cyclamens 
in Tyrolean meadows welcomed us, and search- 
ing among the loose grasses by the water-side 
we found the exquisite purple spikes of the lesser 
fringed orchis, loveliest and most ethereal of 
all the woodland flowers save one. And what 
one is that.^ Ah, my friend, it is your own 
particular favourite, the flower, by whatever 
name you call it, that you plucked long ago 
when you were walking in 'the forest with your 
sweetheart, — 

wunderschonen Monat Mai 
Als alle Knospen sprangen.'’ 

We launched our canoes again on the great 
pool at the foot of the first fall, — sl broad 
sweep of water a mile long and half a mile wide, 
full of eddies and strong currents, and covered 
with drifting foam. There was the old camp- 
ground on the point, where I had tented so 
often with my lady Greygown, fishing for ouan- 
aniche, the famous land-locked salmon of Lake 
St. John. And there were the big fish, showing 
191 


LITTLE RIVERS 


their back fins as they circled lazily around in 
the eddies, as if they were waiting to play with 
us. But the goal of our day’s journey was 
miles away, and we swept along with the stream, 
now through a rush of quick water, boiling and 
foaming, now through a still place like a lake, 
now through 

Fairy crowds 
Of islands, that together lie. 

As quietly as spots of shy 
Among the evening clouds^ 

The beauty of the shores was infinitely varied, 
and unspoiled by any sign of the presence of 
man. We met no company except a few king- 
fishers, and a pair of gulls who had come up 
from the sea to spend the summer, and a large 
flock of wild ducks, which the guides call “Bet- 
seys,” as if they were all of the gentler sex.* 
In such a big family of girls we supposed that 
a few would not be missed, and Damon bagged 
two of the tenderest for our supper. 

In the still water at the mouth of the Riviere 
Mistook, just above the Rapide aux Cedres, 
we went ashore on a level wooded bank to make 
our first camp and cook our dinner. Let me 
try to sketch our men as they are busied about 
the fire. 

They are all French Canadians of unmixed 

* The real name is Bec-sdet — saw-bill. 

192 


AU LARGE 


blood, descendants of the men who came to 
New France with Samuel de Champlain, that 
incomparable old woodsman and life-long lover 
of the wilderness. Ferdinand Larouche is our 
chef — ^there must be a head in every party for 
the sake of harmony — ^and his assistant is his 
brother Frangois. Ferdinand is a stocky little 
fellow, a sawed off” man, not more than five 
feet two inches tall, but every inch of him is 
pure vim. He can carry a big canoe or a hun- 
dred-weight of camp stuff over a mile portage 
without stopping to take breath. He is a 
capital canoe-man, with prudence enough to 
balance his courage, and a fair cook, with plenty 
of that quality which is wanting in the ordinary 
cook of commerce — good humour. Always jok- 
ing, whistling, singing, he brings the atmosphere 
of a perpetual holiday along with him. His 
weather-worn coat covers a heart full of music. 
He has two talents which make him a marked 
man among his comrades. He plays the fiddle 
to the delight of all the balls and weddings 
through the country-side; and he speaks Eng- 
lish to the admiration and envy of the other 
guides. But like all men of genius he is modest 
about his accomplishments. ‘‘H’l not spik 
good h’English — ^h’only for camp — ^fishin’, cook- 
in’, de voyage — ^h’all dose t’ings.” The aspirates 
puzzle him. He can get through a slash of 
fallen timber more easily than a sentence full 
193 


LITTLE RIVERS 


of “this” and “that.” Sometimes he expresses 
his meaning queerly. He was telling me once 
about his farm, “not far off here, in dhe Riviere 
au Cochon, river of dhe pig, you call ’im. HT 
am a widow, got five sons, t’ree of dem are 
girls.” But he usually ends by falling back 
into French, which, he assures you, you speak 
to perfection, “much better than the Canadians; 
the French of Paris in short — ^M’sieu’ has been 
in Paris .^” Such courtesy is born in the blood, 
and is irresistible. You cannot help returning 
the compliment and assuring him that his Eng- 
lish is remarkable, good enough for all practical 
purposes, better than any of the other guides 
can speak. And so it is. 

Frangois is a little taller, a little thinner, 
and considerably quieter than Ferdinand. He 
laughs loyally at his brother’s jokes, and sings 
the response to his songs, and wields a good 
second paddle in the canoe. 

Jean — commonly called Johnny — ^Morel is a 
tall, strong man of fifty, with a bushy red 
beard that would do credit to a pirate. But 
when you look at him more closely, you see 
that he has a clear, kind blue eye and a most 
honest, friendly face under his slouch hat. He 
has travelled these woods and waters for thirty 
years, so that he knows the way through them by 
a thousand familiar signs, as well as you know 
the streets of the city. He is our path-finder. 
194 


AU LARGE 


The bow paddle in his canoe is held by his 
son Joseph, a lad not quite fifteen, but already 
as tall, and almost as strong as a man. “He 
is yet of the youth,” said Johnny, “and he 
knows not the affairs of the camp. This trip 
is for him the first — ^it is his school — ^but I hope 
he will content you. He is good, M’sieu’, and 
of the strongest for his age. I have educated 
already two sons in the bow of my canoe. 
The oldest has gone to Pennsylvanie ; he peels 
the bark there for the tanning of leather. The 
second had the misfortune of breaking his leg, 
so that he can no longer kneel to paddle. He 
has descended to the making of shoes. Joseph 
is my third pupil. And I have still a younger 
one at home waiting to come into my school.” 

A touch of family life like that is always re- 
freshing, and doubly so in the wilderness. For 
what is fatherhood at its best, everywhere, but 
the training of good men to take the teacher’s 
place when his work is done ? Some day, when 
Johnny’s rheumatism has made his joints a 
little stiffer and his eyes have lost something of 
their keenness, he will be second paddle in the 
boat, and going out only on the short and easy 
trips. It will be young Joseph that steers the 
canoe through the dangerous places, and carries 
the heaviest load over the portages, and leads 
the way on the long journeys. 

It has taken me longer to describe our men 
195 


LITTLE RIVERS 


than it took them to prepare our frugal meal: 
a pot of tea, the woodsman’s favourite drink, 
(I never knew a good guide that would not go 
without whisky rather than without tea,) a few 
slices of toast and juicy rashers of bacon, a ket- 
tle of boiled potatoes, and a relish of crackers 
and cheese. We were in a hurry to be off for 
an afternoon’s fishing, three or four miles down 
the river, at the He Maligne. 

The island is well named, for it is the most 
perilous place on the river, and has a record of 
disaster and death. The scattered waters of 
the Discharge are drawn together here into 
one deep, narrow, powerful stream, fiowing be- 
tween gloomy shores of granite. In mid-channel 
the wicked island shows its scarred and bristling 
head, like a giant ready to dispute the passage. 
The river rushes straight at the rocky brow, 
splits into two currents, and raves away on 
both sides of the island in a double chain of 
furious falls and rapids. 

In these wild waters we fished with immense 
delight and fair success, scrambling down among 
the huge rocks along the shore, and joining the 
excitement of an Alpine climb with the placid 
pleasures of angling. At nightfall we were at 
home again in our camp, with half a score of 
ouananiche, weighing from one to four pounds 
each. 

Our next day’s journey was long and varie- 
196 


AU LARGE 


gated. A portage of a mile or two across the 
He d’Alma, with a cart to haul our canoes and 
stuff, brought us to the Little Discharge, down 
which we floated for a little way, and then 
hauled through the village of St. Joseph to the 
foot of the Carcajou, or Wildcat Falls. A mile 
of quick water was soon passed, and we came to 
the junction of the Little Discharge with the 
Grand Discharge at the point where the pictur- 
esque club-house stands in a grove of birches 
beside the big Vache-Caille Falls. It is lively 
work crossing the pool here, when the water is 
high and the canoes are heavy; but we went 
through the labouring seas safely, and landed 
some distance below, at the head of the Rapide 
Gervais, to eat our lunch. The water was too 
rough to run down with loaded boats, so Damon 
and I had to walk about three miles along the 
river-bank, while the men went down with the 
canoes. 

On our way beside the rapids, Damon geolo- 
gised, finding the marks of ancient glaciers, and 
bits of iron-ore, and pockets of sand full of in- 
finitesimal garnets, and specks of gold washed 
from the primitive granite; and I fished, pick- 
ing up a pair of ouananiche in foam-covered 
nooks among the rocks. The swift water was 
almost passed when we embarked again and ran 
down the last slope into a long dead water. 

The shores, at first bold and rough, covered 
197 


LITTLE RIVERS 


with dense thickets of second-growth timber, 
now became smoother and more fertile. Scat- 
tered farms, with square, unpainted houses, and 
long, thatched barns, began to creep over the 
hills toward the river. There was a hamlet, 
called St. Charles, with a rude little church and 
a campanile of logs. The cure, robed in decent 
black and wearing a tall silk hat of the vintage 
of 1860, sat on the veranda of his trim pres- 
bytery, looking down upon us, like an image 
of propriety smiling at Bohemianism. Other 
craft appeared on the river. A man and his 
wife paddling an old dugout, with half a dozen 
children packed in amidships; a crew of lum- 
bermen, in a sharp-nosed bateau, picking up 
stray logs along the banks; a couple of boat- 
loads of young people returning merrily from a 
holiday visit; a party of berry-pickers in a flat- 
bottomed skiff; all the life of the country-side 
was in evidence on the river. We felt quite as 
if we had been “in the swim” of society, when 
at length we reached the point where the Riviere 
des Aunes came tumbling down a hundred-foot 
ladder of broken black rocks. There we pitched 
our tents in a strip of meadow by the water- 
side, where we could have the sound of the falls 
for a slumber-song all night and the whole river 
for a bath at sunrise. 

A sparkling draught of crystal weather was 
poured into our stirrup-cup in the morning, as 
198 


AU LARGE 


we set out for a drive of fifteen miles across 
country to the Riviere a TOurs, a tributary of 
the crooked, unnavigable river of Alders. The 
canoes and luggage were loaded on a couple of 
charrettes, or two-wheeled carts. But for us 
and the guides there were two quatre-roues, the 
typical vehicles of the century, as characteristic 
of Canada as the carriole is of Norway. It is 
a two-seated buckboard, drawn by one horse, 
and the back seat is covered with a hood like 
an old-fashioned poke bonnet. The road is of 
clay and always rutty. It runs level for a while, 
and then jumps up a steep ridge and down again, 
or into a deep gully and out again. The habi- 
tanfs idea of good driving is to let his horse 
slide down one hill and gallop up the other. 
This imparts a spasmodic quality to the motion, 
like Carlyle’s style. 

The native houses are strung along the road. 
The modern pattern has a convex angle in the 
roof, and dormer-windows; it is a rustic adap- 
tation of the Mansard. The antique pattern, 
which is far more picturesque, has a concave 
curve in the roof, and the eaves project like 
eyebrows, shading the flatness of the face. 
Paint is a rarity. The prevailing colour is the 
soft gray of weather-beaten wood. Sometimes, 
in the better class of houses, a gallery is built 
across the front and around one side, and a 
square of garden is fenced in, with dahlias and 
199 


LITTLE RIVERS 


hollyhocks and marigolds, and perhaps a strug- 
gling rosebush, and usually a small patch of 
tobacco growing in one corner. Once in a long 
while you may see a balm-of-Gilead tree, or a 
clump of sapling poplars, planted near the door. 

How much better it would have been if the 
farmer had left a few of the noble forest trees 
to shade his house. But then, when the farmer 
came into the wilderness he was not a farmer, 
he was first of all a wood-chopper. He re- 
garded the forest as a stubborn enemy in pos- 
session of his land. He attacked it with fire 
and axe and exterminated it, instead of keep- 
ing a few captives to hold their green umbrellas 
over his head when at last his grain fields should 
be smiling around him and he should sit down 
on his doorstep to smoke a pipe of home-grown 
tobacco. 

In the time of adversity one should prepare 
for prosperity. I fancy there are a good many 
people unconsciously repeating the mistake of 
the Canadian farmer — chopping down all the 
native growths of life, clearing the ground of 
all the useless pretty things that seem to cum- 
ber it, sacrificing everything to utility and suc- 
cess. We fell the last green tree for the sake of 
raising an extra hill of potatoes; and never stop 
to think what an ugly, barren place we may 
have to sit in while we eat them. The ideals, 
the attachments — ^yes, even the dreams of youth 
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are worth saving. For the artificial tastes with 
which age tries to make good their loss grow 
very slowly and cast but a slender shade. 

Most of the Canadian farmhouses have their 
ovens out-of-doors. We saw them everywhere; 
rounded edifices of clay, raised on a foundation 
of logs, and usually covered with a pointed roof 
of boards. They looked like little family chapels 
— ^and so they were; shrines where the ritual of 
the good housewife was celebrated, and the gift 
of daily bread, having been honestly earned, 
was thankfully received. 

At one house we noticed a curious fragment 
of domestic economy. Half a pig was sus- 
pended over the chimney, and the smoke of the 
summer fire was turned to account in curing 
the winter’s meat. I guess the children of that 
family had a peculiar fondness for the parental 
roof-tree. We saw them making mud-pies in 
the road, and imagined that they looked lov- 
ingly up at the pendent porker, outlined against 
the sky , — a sign of promise, prophetic of bacon. 

About noon the road passed beyond the region 
of habitation into a barren land, where blue- 
berries were the only crop, and partridges took 
the place of chickens. Through this rolling 
gravelly plain, sparsely wooded and glowing 
with the tall magenta bloom of the fireweed, 
we drove toward the mountains, until the road 
went to seed and we could follow it no longer. 

201 


LITTLE RIVERS 


Then we took to the water and began to pole 
our canoes up the River of the Bear. It was a 
clear, amber-coloured stream, not more than 
ten or fifteen yards wide, running swift and 
strong, over beds of sand and rounded pebbles. 
The canoes went wallowing and plunging up the 
narrow channel, between thick banks of alders, 
like clumsy sea-monsters. All the grace with 
which they move under the strokes of the pad- 
dle, in large waters, was gone. They looked 
uncouth and predatory, like a pair of seals that 
I once saw swimming far up the river Risti- 
gouche in chase of fish. From the bow of each 
canoe the landing-net stuck out as a symbol of 
destruction — rafter the fashion of the Dutch ad- 
miral who nailed a broom to his masthead. 
But it would have been impossible to sweep the 
trout out of that little river by any fair method 
of angling, for there were millions of them; not 
large, but lively, and brilliant, and fat; they 
leaped in every bend of the stream. We trailed 
our flies, and made quick casts here and there, 
as we went along. It was fishing on the wing. 
And when we pitched our tents in a hurry at 
nightfall on the low shore of Lac SMe, among the 
bushes where firewood was scarce and there 
were no sapins for the beds, we were comforted 
for the poorness of the camp-ground by the ex- 
cellence of the trout supper. 

It was a bitter cold night for August. There 
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was a skin of ice on the water-pail at daybreak. 
We were glad to be up and away for an early 
start. The river grew wilder and more diffi- 
cult. There were rapids, and ruined dams built 
by the lumbermen years ago. At these places 
the trout were larger, and so plentiful that it 
was easy to hook two at a cast. It came on to 
rain furiously while we were eating our lunch. 
But we did not seem to mind it any more than 
the fish did. Here and there the river was com- 
pletely blocked by fallen trees. The guides 
called it bouchee^ ‘^corked,” and leaped out 
gayly into the water with their axes to ‘‘un- 
cork” it. We passed through some pretty 
lakes, unknown to the map-makers, and arrived, 
before sundown, at the Lake of the Bear, where 
we were to spend a couple of days. The lake 
was full of floating logs, and the water, raised 
by the heavy rains and the operations of the 
lumbermen, was several feet above its usual 
level. Nature’s landing-places were all blotted 
out, and we had to explore halfway around the 
shore before we could get out comfortably. We 
raised the tents on a small shoulder of a hill, a 
few rods above the water; and a glorious camp- 
fire of birch logs soon made us forget our misery 
as though it had not been. 

The name of the Lake of the Beautiful Trout 
made us desire to visit it. The portage was 
said to be only fifty acres long (the arpent is the 
203 


LITTLE RIVERS 


popular measure of distance here), but it passed 
over a ridge of newly burned land, and was so 
entangled with ruined woods and desolate of 
birds and flowers that it seemed to us at least 
five miles. The lake was charming — a sheet of 
singularly clear water, of a pale green tinge, 
surrounded by wooded hills. In the translucent 
depths trout and pike live together, but whether 
in peace or not I cannot tell. Both of them 
grow to an enormous size, but the pike are 
larger and have more capacious jaws. One of 
them broke my tackle and went off with a sil- 
ver spoon in his mouth, as if he had been born 
with it. Of course the guides vowed that they 
saw him as he passed under the canoe, and 
declared that he must weigh thirty or forty 
pounds. The spectacles of regret always mag- 
nify. 

The trout were coy. We took only five of 
them, perfect specimens of the true Salvelinus 
fontinalis, with square tails, and carmine spots 
on their dark, mottled sides; the largest weighed 
three pounds and three-quarters, and the others 
were almost as heavy. 

On our way back to the camp we found the 
portage beset by innumerable and bloodthirsty 
foes. There are four grades of insect malignity 
in the woods. The mildest is represented by 
the winged idiot that John Burroughs’ little boy 
called a ‘‘blunderhead.” He dances stupidly 
204 


AU LARGE 


before your face, as if lost in admiration, and 
finishes his pointless tale by getting in your 
eye, or down your throat. The next grade is 
represented by the midges. ‘‘Bite ’em no see 
’em,” is the Indian name for these invisible 
atoms of animated pepper which settle upon 
you in the twilight and make your skin burn 
like fire. But their hour is brief, and when they 
depart they leave not a lump behind. One step 
lower in the scale we find the mosquito, or rather 
he finds us, and makes his poisoned mark upon 
our skin. But after all, he has his good quali- 
ties. The mosquito is a gentlemanly pirate. 
He carries his weapon openly, and gives notice 
of an attack. He respects the decencies of life, 
and does not strike below the belt, or creep 
down the back of your neck. But the black 
fly is at the bottom of the moral scale. He is an 
unmitigated ruffian, the plug-ugly of the woods. 
He looks like a tiny, immature house-fly in 
August, with white legs as if innocent. But, in 
fact, he crawls like a serpent and bites like a 
dog. No portion of the human frame is sacred 
from his greed. He takes his pound of flesh 
anywhere, and does not scruple to take the 
blood with it. As a rule you can defend your- 
self, to some degree, against him, by wearing a 
head-net, tying your sleeves around your wrists 
and your trousers around your ankles, and 
anointing yourself with grease flavoured with 
205 


LITTLE RIVERS 


pennyroyal, for which cleanly and honest scent 
he has a coarse aversion. But sometimes, espe« 
cially on burned land, about the middle of a 
warm afternoon, when a rain is threatening, 
the horde of black flies descend in force and 
fury knowing that their time is short. Then 
there is no escape. Suits of chain armour, Nu- 
bian ointments of far-smelling potency, would 
not save you. You must do as our guides did 
on the portage, submit to fate and walk along 
in heroic silence, like Marco Bozzaris ‘‘bleeding 
at every vein,” — or do as Damon and I did, 
break into ejaculations and a run, until you 
reach a place where you can light a smudge and 
hold your head over it. 

“And yet,” said my comrade, as we sat 
coughing and rubbing our eyes in the painful 
shelter of the smoke, “there are worse trials 
than this in the civilized districts: social en- 
mities, and newspaper scandals, and religious 
persecutions. The blackest fly I ever saw is 

the Reverend ” but here his voice was 

fortunately choked by a fit of coughing. 

A couple of wandering Indians — descendants 
of the Montagnais, on whose hunting domain 
we were travelling — dropped in at our camp 
that night as we sat around the fire. They 
gave us the latest news about the portages on 
our further journey; how far they had been 
blocked with fallen trees, and whether the water 
206 


AU LARGE 


was high or low in the rivers — ^just as a visitor 
at home would talk about the effect of the 
strikes on the stock market, and the prospects 
of the newest organization of the non-voting 
classes for the overthrow of Tammany Hall. 
Every phase of civilization or barbarism cre- 
ates its own conversational currency. The 
weather, like the old Spanish dollar, is the only 
coin that passes everywhere. 

But our Indians did not carry much small 
change about them. They were dark, silent 
chaps, soon talked out; and then they sat suck- 
ing their pipes before the fire, (as dumb as their 
own wooden effigies in front of a tobacconist’s 
shop,) until the spirit moved them, and they 
vanished in their canoe down the dark lake. 
Our own guides were very different. They were 
as full of conversation as a spruce-tree is of 
gum. When all shallower themes were ex- 
hausted they would discourse of bears and 
canoes and lumber and fish, forever. After 
Damon and I had left the fire and rolled our- 
selves in the blankets in our own tent, we could 
hear the men going on and on with their simple 
jests and endless tales of adventure, until sleep 
drowned their voices. 

It was the sound of a French chanson that 
woke us early on the morning of our departure 
from the Lake of the Bear. A gang of lumber- 
men were bringing a lot of logs through the 
207 


LITTLE RIVERS 


lake. Half-hidden in the cold gray mist that 
usually betokens a fine day, and wet to the 
waist from splashing about after their unwieldy 
flock, these rough fellows were singing at their 
work as cheerfully as a party of robins in a 
cherry-tree at sunrise. It was like the miller 
and the two girls whom Wordsworth saw danc- 
ing in their boats on the Thames: 

‘‘ They dance not for me. 

Yet mine is their glee ! 

Thus pleasure is spread through the earth 

In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall 
find ; 

Thus a rich loving-kindness, redundantly kind. 
Moves all nature to gladness and mirths 

But our later thoughts of the lumbermen 
were not altogether grateful, when we arrived 
that day, after a mile of portage, at the little 
Riviere Blanche, upon which we had counted 
to float us down to Lac Tchitagama, and found 
that they had stolen all its water to float their 
logs down the Lake of the Bear. The poor little 
river was as dry as a theological novel. There 
was nothing left of it except the bed and the 
bones; it was like a Connecticut stream in the 
middle of August. All its pretty secrets were 
laid bare; all its music was hushed. The pools 
that lingered among the rocks seemed like big 
tears; and the voice of the forlorn rivulets that 
208 


AU LARGE 


trickled in here and there, seeking the parent 
stream, was a voice of weeping and complaint. 

For us the loss meant a hard day’s work, 
scrambling over slippery stones, and splashing 
through puddles, and forcing a way through the 
tangled thickets on the bank, instead of a pleas- 
ant two hours’ run on a swift current. We ate 
our dinner on a sandbank in what was once the 
middle of a pretty pond; and entered, as the 
sun was sinking, a narrow wooded gorge be- 
tween the hills, completely filled by a chain of 
small lakes, where travelling became easy and 
pleasant. The steep shores, clothed with cedar 
and black spruce and green-blue fir-trees, rose 
sheer from the water; the passage from lake to 
lake was a tiny rapid a few yards long, gurgling 
through mossy rocks; at the foot of the chain 
there was a longer rapid, with a portage beside 
it. We emerged from the dense bush suddenly 
and found ourselves face to face with Lake 
Tchitagama. 

How the heart expands at such a view ! 
Nine miles of shining water lay stretched before 
us, opening through the mountains that guarded 
it on both sides with lofty walls of green and 
gray, ridge over ridge, point beyond point, until 
the vista ended in 

“ Yon orange sunset waning slow.^^ 

At a moment like this one feels a sense of exul- 
tation. It is a new discovery of the joy of liv- 
209 


LITTLE RIVERS 


ing. And yet, my friend and I confessed to 
each other, there was a tinge of sadness, an in- 
explicable regret mingled with our joy. Was it 
the thought of how few human eyes had ever 
seen that lovely vision Was it the dim fore- 
boding that we might never see it again ? Who 
can explain the secret pathos of Nature’s love- 
liness.^ It is a touch of melancholy inherited 
from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious 
memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense 
that even if we could find another Eden, we 
should not be fit to enjoy it perfectly, nor stay 
in it forever. 

Our first camp on Tchitagama was at the 
sunrise end of the lake, in a bay paved with 
small round stones, laid close together and 
beaten firmly down by the waves. There, and 
along the shores below, at the mouth of a little 
river that foamed in over a ledge of granite, 
and in the shadow of cliffs of limestone and 
feldspar, we trolled and took many fish: pike of 
enormous size, fresh-water sharks, devourers of 
nobler game, fit only to kill and throw away 
“to feed the bears”; huge old trout of six or 
seven pounds, with broad tails and hooked jaws, 
fine fighters and poor food; stupid, wide-mouthed 
chub — ouitouche, the Indians call them — ^biting 
at hooks that were not baited for them; and best 
of all, high-bred ouananiche, pleasant to cap- 
ture and delicate to eat. 

210 


AU LARGE 


Our second camp was on a sandy point at 
the sunset end of the lake — a fine place for 
bathing, and convenient to the wild meadows 
and blueberry patches, where Damon went to 
hunt for bears. He did not find any; but once 
he heard a great noise in the bushes, which he 
thought was a bear; and he declared that he 
got quite as much excitement out of it as if it 
had had four legs and a mouthful of teeth. 

He brought back from one of his expeditions 
an Indian letter, which he had found in a cleft 
stick by the river. It was a sheet of birch- 
bark with a picture drawn on it in charcoal; 
five Indians in a canoe paddling up the river, 
and one in another canoe pointing in another 
direction; we read it as a message left by a 
hunting party, telling their companions not to 
go on up the river, because it was already occu- 
pied, but to turn off on a side stream. 

There was a sign of a different kind nailed to 
an old stump behind our camp. It was the top 
of a soap-box, with an inscription after this 
fashion : 

AD. MEYER & B. LEVIT 
Soap Mfrs. N. Y. 

Camped here July 18 — 

1 Trout 173^ Pounds. II Ouan 
anisHes 18J^ Pounds. One 
Pike 1473^ lbs. 

211 


LITTLE RIVERS 


There was a combination of piscatorial pride 
and mercantile enterprise in this quaint device, 
that took our fancy. It suggested also a curi- 
ous question of psychology in regard to the in- 
hibitory influence of horses and fish upon the 
human nerve of veracity. We named the place 
‘‘Point Ananias.” 

And yet, in fact, it was a wild and lonely 
spot, and not even the Hebrew inscription could 
spoil the sense of solitude that surrounded us 
when the night came, and the storm howled 
across the lake, and the darkness encircled us 
with a wall that only seemed the more dense 
and impenetrable as the firelight blazed and 
leaped within the black ring. 

“ How far away is the nearest house, Johnny ? ” 
“I don’t know; fifty miles, I suppose.” 

“And what would you do if the canoes were 
burned, or if a tree fell and smashed them.^^” 
“Well, I’d say a Pater noster, and take bread 
and bacon enough for four days, and an axe, 
and plenty of matches, and make a straight line 
through the woods. But it would n’t be a joke 
M’sieu’, I can tell you.” 

The river Peribonca, into which Lake Tchi- 
tagama flows without a break, is the noblest of 
all the streams that empty into Lake St. John. 
It is said to be more than three hundred miles 
long, and at the mouth of the lake it is per- 
haps a thousand feet wide, flowing with a deep, 
212 


AU LARGE 


still current through the forest. The dead-water 
lasted for several miles; then the river sloped 
into a rapid, spread through a net of islands, 
and broke over a ledge in a cataract. Another 
quiet stretch was followed by another fall, and 
so on, along the whole course of the river. 

We passed three of these falls in the first 
day’s voyage (by portages so steep and rough 
that an Adirondack guide would have turned 
gray at the sight of them), and camped at night 
just below the Chute du Diable, where we found 
some ouananiche in the foam. Our tents were 
on an islet, and all around we saw the primeval, 
savage beauty of a world unmarred by man. 

The river leaped, shouting, down its double 
stairway of granite, rejoicing like a strong man 
to run a race. The after-glow in the western 
sky deepened from saffron to violet among the 
tops of the cedars, and over the cliffs rose the 
moonlight, paling the heavens but glorifying 
the earth. There was something large and 
generous and untrammelled in the scene, re- 
calling one of Walt Whitman’s rhapsodies: — 

Earth of departed sunsets I Earth of the moun- 
tains misty-topped ! 

Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just 
tinged with blue I 

Earth of shine and dark^ mottling the tide of the 
river /” 


213 


LITTLE RIVERS 


All the next day we went down with the cur- 
rent. Regiments of black spruce stood in end- 
less files like grenadiers, each tree capped with 
a thick tuft of matted cones and branches. 
Tall white birches leaned out over the stream. 
Narcissus-like, as if to see their own beauty in 
the moving mirror. There were touches of 
colour on the banks, the ragged pink flowers of 
the Joe-Pye-weed (which always reminds me of 
a happy, good-natured tramp), and the yellow 
ear-drops of the jewel-weed, and the intense 
blue of the closed gentian, that strange flower 
which, like a reticent heart, never opens to the 
light. Sometimes the river spread out like a 
lake, between high bluffs of sand fully a mile 
apart; and again it divided into many channels, 
winding cunningly down among the islands as 
if it were resolved to slip around the next bar- 
rier of rock without a fall. There were eight of 
these huge natural dams in the course of that 
day’s journey. Sometimes we followed one of 
the side canals, and made the portage at a dis- 
tance from the main cataract; and sometimes 
we ran with the central current to the very 
brink of the chute , darting aside just in time to 
escape going over. At the foot of the last fall 
we made our camp on a curving beach of sand, 
and spent the rest of the afternoon in fishing. 

It was interesting to see how closely the guides 
could guess at the weight of the fish by looking 
214 


AU LARGE 


at them. The ouananiche are much longer in 
proportion to their weight than trout, and a 
novice almost always overestimates them. But 
the guides were not deceived. “This one will 
weigh four pounds and three-quarters, and this 
one four pounds, but that one not more than 
three pounds; he is meagre, M’sieu’, but he is 
meagre.” When we went ashore and tried the 
spring balance (which every angler ought to 
carry with him, as an aid to his conscience), 
the guides guess usually proved to be within 
an ounce or two of the fact. Any one of the 
senses can be educated to do the work of the 
others. The eyes of these experienced fisher- 
men were as sensitive to weight as if they had 
been made to use as scales. 

Below the last fall the Peribonca flows for a 
score of miles with an unbroken, ever-widening 
stream, through low shores of forest and bush 
and meadow. Near its mouth the Little Peri- 
bonca joins it, and the immense flood, nearly 
two miles wide, pours into Lake St. John. 
Here we saw the first outpost of civilisation — a 
huge unpainted storehouse, where supplies are 
kept for the lumbermen and the new settlers. 
Here also we found the tiny, lame steam launch 
that was to carry us back to the Hotel Rober- 
val. Our canoes were stowed upon the roof of 
the cabin, and we embarked for the last stage 
of our long journey. 


215 


LITTLE RIVERS 


As we came out of the river-mouth, the oppo- 
site shore of the lake was invisible, and a stiff 
‘‘Nor’ wester” was rolling big waves across the 
bar. It was like putting out into the open sea. 
The launch laboured and puffed along for four 
or five miles, growing more and more asthmatic 
with every breath. Then there was an explo- 
sion in the engine-room. Some necessary part 
of the intestinal machinery had blown out. 
There was a moment of confusion. The cap- 
tain hurried to drop the anchor, and the narrow 
craft lay rolling in the billows. 

What to do ? The captain shrugged his 
shoulders like a Frenchman. “Wait here, I 
suppose.” But how long “Who knows Per- 
haps till to-morrow; perhaps the day after. 
They will send another boat to look for us in 
the course of time.” 

But the quarters were cramped; the weather 
looked ugly; if the wind should rise, the cranky 
launch would not be a safe cradle for the night. 
Damon and I preferred the canoes, for they at 
least would fioat if they were capsized. So we 
stepped into the frail, buoyant shells of bark 
once more, and danced over the big waves 
toward the shore. We made a camp on a wind- 
swept point of sand, and felt like shipwrecked 
mariners. But it was a gilt-edged shipwreck. 
For our larder was still full, and as if to provide 
us with the luxuries as well as the necessities of 
216 


AU LARGE 


life, Nature had spread an inexhaustible dessert 
of the largest and most luscious blueberries 
around our tents. 

After supper, strolling along the beach, we 
debated the best way of escape; whether to send 
one of our canoes around the eastern shore of 
the lake that night, to meet the steamer at the 
Island House and bring it to our rescue; or 
to set out the next morning, and paddle both 
canoes around the western end of the lake, 
thirty miles, to the Hotel Roberval. While 
we were talking, we came to a dry old birch- 
tree, with ragged, curling bark. ‘^Here is a 
torch,” cried Damon, ‘‘to throw light upon the 
situation.” He touched a match to it, and the 
flames flashed up the tall trunk until it was 
transformed into a pillar of fire. But the sud- 
den illumination burned out, and our counsels 
were wrapt again in darkness and uncertainty, 
when there came a great uproar of steam-whis- 
tles from the lake. They must be signalling for 
us. What could it mean ? 

We fired our guns, leaped into a canoe, 
leaving two of the guides to break camp, and 
paddled out swiftly into the night. It seemed 
an endless distance before we found the feeble 
light where the crippled launch was tossing at 
anchor. The captain shouted something about 
a larger steamboat and a raft of logs, out in the 
lake, a mile or two beyond. Presently we saw 
217 


LITTLE RIVERS 


the lights, and the orange glow of the cabin win- 
dows. Was she coming, or going, or standing 
still We paddled on as fast as we could, 
shouting and firing off a revolver until we had 
no more cartridges. We were resolved not to 
let that mysterious vessel escape us, and threw 
ourselves with energy into the novel excitement 
of chasing a steamboat in the dark. 

Then the lights began to swing around; the 
throbbing of paddle-wheels grew louder and 
louder; she was evidently coming straight toward 
us. At that moment it flashed upon us that, 
while she had plenty of lights, we had none! 
We were lying, invisible, right across her track. 
The character of the steamboat chase was re- 
versed. We turned and fled, as the guides say, 
a quatre pattes, into illimitable space, trying to 
get out of the way of our too powerful friend. It 
makes considerable difference, in the voyage of 
life, whether you chase the steamboat, or the 
steamboat chases you. 

Meantime our other canoe had approached 
unseen. The steamer passed safely between the 
two boats, slackening speed as the pilot caught 
our loud halloo ! She loomed up above us like 
a man-of-war, and as we climbed the ladder to 
the main-deck we felt that we had indeed gotten 
out of the wilderness. My old friend. Captain 
Savard, made us welcome. He had been sent 
out, much to his disgust, to catch a runaway 
218 


AU LARGE 


boom of logs and tow it back to Roberval; it 
would be an all night affair; but we must take 
possession of his stateroom and make ourselves 
comfortable; he would certainly bring us to the 
hotel in time for breakfast. So he went off on 
the upper deck, and we heard him stamping 
about and yelling to his crew as they struggled 
to get their unwieldy drove of six thousand logs 
in motion. 

All night long we assisted at the lumbermen’s 
difficult enterprise. We heard the steamer 
snorting and straining at her clumsy, stubborn 
convoy. The hoarse shouts of the crew, dis- 
guised in a mongrel dialect which made them 
(perhaps fortunately) less intelligible and more 
forcible, mingled with our broken dreams. 

But it was, in fact, a fitting close of our voy- 
age. For what were we doing We were “as- 
sisting” (as the French use the word) at the 
last stage of the woodman’s labour. It was the 
gathering of a wild herd of the houses and 
churches and ships and bridges that grow in 
the forests, and bringing them into the fold of 
human service. I wonder how often the in- 
habitant of the snug Queen Anne cottage in the 
suburbs remembers the picturesque toil and 
varied hardship that it has cost to hew and 
drag his walls and fioors and pretty peaked 
roofs out of the backwoods. It might enlarge 
his home, and make his musings by the winter 
219 


LITTLE RIVERS 


fireside less commonplace, to give a kindly 
thought now and then to the long chain of 
human workers through whose hands the tim- 
ber of his house has passed, since it first felt the 
stroke of the axe in the snow-bound winter 
woods, and fioated, through the spring and 
summer, on far-off lakes and little rivers, au 
large. 

1894. 


220 


TROUT-FISHING IN THE 
TRAUN 


“ Those who rvish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themsdves 
for a time from the ties and objects that recall them ; hut we can be said only 
to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account 
like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could 
^ anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home .” — William 
Hazlitt: On Going a Journey. 


TROUT-FISHING IN THE 
TRAUN 

peculiarity of trout-fishing in the Traun 
is that one catches principally grayling. 
But in this it resembles some other pursuits 
which are not without their charm for minds 
open to the pleasures of the unexpected — ^for 
example, reading George Sorrow’s The Bible in 
Spain with a view to theological information, 
or going to the opening night at the Academy 
of Design with the intention of looking at pic- 
tures. 

Moreover, there are really trout in the Traun, 
rari nantes in gurgite; and in some places more 
than in others; and all of high spirit, though 
few of great size. Thus the angler has his 
favourite problem: Given an unknown stream 
and two kinds of fish, the one better than the 
other; to find the better kind, and discover the 
hour at which they will rise. This is sport. 

As for the little river itself, it has so many 
beauties that one does not think of asking 
whether it has any faults. Constant fulness, 
and crystal clearness, and refreshing coolness of 
living water, pale green like the jewel that is 
223 


LITTLE RIVERS 


called aqua marina, flowing over beds of clean 
sand and bars of polished gravel, and dropping 
in momentary foam from rocky ledges, between 
banks that are shaded by groves of fir and ash 
and poplar, or through dense thickets of alder 
and willow, or across meadows of smooth ver- 
dure sloping up to quaint old-world villages — 
all these are features of an ideal little river. 

I have spoken of these personal qualities 
first, because a truly moral writer ought to 
make more of character than of position. A 
good river in a bad country would be more 
worthy of affection than a bad river in a good 
country. But the Traun has also the advan- 
tages of an excellent worldly position. For it 
rises all over the Salzkammergut, the summer 
hunting-ground of the Austrian Emperor, and 
flows through that most picturesque corner of 
his domain from end to end. Under the des- 
olate cliffs of the Todtengebirge on the east, 
and below the shining ice-fields of the Dach- 
stein on the south, and from the green alps 
around St. Wolfgang on the west, the trans- 
lucent waters are gathered in little tarns, and 
shot through roaring brooks, and spread into 
lakes of wondrous beauty, and poured through 
growing streams, until at last they are all united 
just below the summer villa of his Kaiserly and 
Kingly Majesty, Francis Joseph, and flow away 
northward, through the rest of his game-pre- 
224 


TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN 


serve, into the Traunsee. It is an imperial 
playground; and such as I would consent to 
hunt the chamois in, if an inscrutable Provi- 
dence had made me a kingly kaiser, or even a 
plain king or an unvarnished kaiser. But, fail- 
ing this, I was perfectly content to spend a few 
idle days in fishing for trout and catching gray- 
ling, at such times and places as the law of the 
Austrian Empire allowed. 

For it must be remembered that every stream 
in these over-civilized European countries be- 
longs to somebody, by purchase or rent. And 
all the fish in the stream are supposed to belong 
to the person who owns or rents it. They do 
not know their master’s voice, neither will they 
follow when he calls. But they are theoretically 
his. To this legal fiction the untutored Ameri- 
can must conform. He must learn to clothe his 
natural desires in the raiment of lawful sanc- 
tion, and take out some kind of a license before 
he follows his impulse to fish. 

It was in the town of Aussee, at the junction 
of the two highest branches of the Traun, that 
this impulse came upon me, mildly irresistible. 
The full bloom of mid-July gayety in that an- 
cient watering-place was dampened, but not 
extinguished, by two days of persistent and sur- 
prising showers. I had exhausted the possibili- 
ties of interest in the old Gothic church, and 
felt all that a man should feel in deciphering 
225 


LITTLE RIVERS 


the mural tombstones of the families who were 
exiled for their faith in the days of the Refor- 
mation. The throngs of merry Hebrews from 
Vienna and Buda-Pesth, amazingly arrayed as 
mountaineers and milk-maids, walking up and 
down the narrow streets under umbrellas, had 
Cleopatra’s charm of an infinite variety; but 
custom staled it. The woodland paths, wind- 
ing everywhere through the plantations of fir- 
trees and provided with appropriate names on 
wooden labels, and benches for rest and con- 
versation at discreet intervals, were too moist 
for even the nymphs to take delight in them. 
The only creatures that suffered nothing by the 
rain were the two swift, limpid Trauns, racing 
through the woods, like eager and unabashed 
lovers, to meet in the middle of the village. 
They were as clear, as joyous, as musical as if 
the sun were shining. The very sight of their 
opalescent rapids and eddying pools was an in- 
vitation to that gentle sport which is said to 
have the merit of growing better as the weather 
grows worse. 

I laid this fact before the landlord of the 
hotel of the Erzherzog Johann, as poetically as 
I could, but he assured me that it was of no 
consequence without an invitation from the 
gentleman to whom the streams belonged; and 
he had gone away for a week. The landlord 
was such a good-natured person, and such an 
226 


TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN 


excellent sleeper, that it was impossible to be- 
lieve that he could have even the smallest in- 
accuracy upon his conscience. So I bade him 
farewell, and took my way, four miles through 
the woods, to the lake from which one of the 
streams flowed. 

It was called the Griindlsee. As I do not 
know the origin of the name, I cannot consist- 
ently make any moral or historical reflections 
upon it. But if it has never become famous, 
it ought to be, for the sake of a cozy and busy 
little Inn, perched on a green hill beside the 
lake and overlooking the whole length of it, 
from the groups of toy villas at the foot to the 
heaps of real mountains at the head. This Inn 
kept a thin but happy landlord, who provided 
me with a blue license to angle, for the incon- 
siderable sum of flfteen cents a day. This con- 
ferred the right of Ashing not only in the Griindl- 
see, but also in the smaller tarn of Toplitz, a 
mile above it, and in the swift stream which 
unites them. It all coincided with my desire 
as if by magic. A row of a couple of miles to 
the head of the lake, and a walk through the 
forest, brought me to the smaller pond; and as 
the afternoon sun was ploughing pale furrows 
through the showers, I waded out on a point of 
reeds and cast the artful fly in the shadow of 
the great cliffs of the Dead Mountains. 

It was a flt scene for a lone flsherman. But 
227 


LITTLE RIVERS 


four sociable tourists promptly appeared to act 
as spectators and critics. Fly-fishing usually 
strikes the German mind as an eccentricity 
which calls for remonstrance. After one of the 
tourists had suggestively narrated the tale of 
seven trout which he had caught in another 
lake, with worms, on the previous Sunday, they 
went away for a row, (with salutations in which 
politeness but thinly veiled their pity,) and left 
me still whipping the water in vain. Nor was 
the fortune of the day much better in the stream 
below. It was a long and wet wade for three 
fish too small to keep. I came out on the shore 
of the lake, where I had left the row-boat, with 
an empty bag and a feeling of damp discourage- 
ment. 

There was still an hour or so of daylight, and 
a beautiful place to fish where the stream poured 
swirling out into the lake. A rise, and a large 
one, though rather slow, awakened my hopes. 
Another rise, evidently made by a heavy fish, 
made me certain that virtue was about to be 
rewarded. The third time the hook went home. 
I felt the solid weight of the fish against the 
spring of the rod, and that curious thrill which 
runs up the line and down the arm, changing, 
somehow or other, into a pleasurable sensation 
of excitement as it reaches the brain. But it 
was only for a moment; and then came that 
foolish, feeble shaking of the line from side to 
228 


TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN 


side which tells the angler that he has hooked a 
great, big, leather-mouthed chub — sl fish which 
Izaak Walton says “the French esteem so mean 
as to call him Un Vilain’^ Was it for this that 
I had come to the country of Francis Joseph? 

I took off the flies and put on one of those 
phantom minnows which have immortalised the 
name of a certain Mr. Brown. The minnow 
swung on a long line as the boat passed back 
and forth across the current, once, twice, three 
times — and on the fourth circle there was a 
sharp strike. The rod bent almost double, and 
the reel sang shrilly to the first rush of the fish. 
He ran; he doubled; he went to the bottom and 
sulked; he tried to go under the boat; he did 
all that a game fish can do, except leaping. 
After twenty minutes he was tired enough to 
be lifted gently into the boat by a hand slipped 
around his gills, and there he was, a lachsforelle 
of three pounds’ weight: small pointed head; 
silver sides mottled with dark spots; square, 
powerful tail and large fins — sl fish not unlike 
the land-locked salmon of the Saguenay, but 
more delicate. 

Half an hour later he was lying on the grass 
in front of the Inn. The waiters paused, with 
their hands full of dishes, to look at him; and 
the landlord called his guests, including my 
didactic tourists, to observe the superiority of 
the trout of the Grundlsee. The maids also 
229 


LITTLE RIVERS 


came to look; and the buxom cook, with her 
spotless apron and bare arms akimbo, was 
drawn from her kitchen, and pledged her cul- 
inary honour that such a pracht-kerl should be 
served up in her very best style. The angler 
who is insensible to this sort of indirect flattery 
through his fish does not exist. Even the most 
indifferent of men thinks more favourably of 
people who know a good trout when they see it, 
and sits down to his supper with kindly feelings. 
Possibly he reflects, also, upon the incident as 
a hint of the usual size of the fish in that neigh- 
bourhood. He remembers that he may have 
been favoured in this case beyond his deserts 
by good-fortune, and resolving not to put too 
heavy a strain upon it, considers the next place 
where it would be well for him to angle. 

Hallstatt is about ten miles below Aussee. 
The Traun here expands into a lake, very dark 
and deep, shut in by steep and lofty mountains. 
The railway runs along the eastern shore. On 
the other side, a mile away, you see the old 
town, its white houses clinging to the cliff like 
lichens to the face of a rock. The guide-book 
calls it ‘^a highly original situation.” But this 
is one of the cases where a little less originality 
and a little more reasonableness might be de- 
sired, at least by the permanent inhabitants. 
A ledge under the shadow of a precipice makes 
a trying winter residence. The people of Hall- 
230 


TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN 


statt are not a blooming race: one sees many 
dwarfs and cripples among them. But to the 
summer traveller the place seems wonderfully 
picturesque. Most of the streets are flights of 
steps. The high-road has barely room to edge 
itself through among the old houses, between 
the window-gardens of bright flowers. On the 
hottest July day the afternoon is cool and shady. 
The gay little skiffs and long open gondolas 
are flitting continually along the lake, which is 
the main street of Hallstatt. 

The incongruous, but comfortable, modern 
hotel has a huge glass veranda, where you can 
eat your dinner and observe human nature in 
its transparent holiday disguises. I was much 
pleased and entertained by a family, or confed- 
eracy, of people attired as peasants — ^the men 
with feathered hats, green stockings, and bare 
knees — ^the women with bright skirts, bodices, 
and silk neckerchiefs — ^who were always in evi- 
dence, rowing gondolas with clumsy oars, meet- 
ing the steamboat at the wharf several times a 
day, and filling the miniature garden of the 
hotel with rustic greetings and early Salzkam- 
mergut attitudes. After much conjecture, I 
learned that they were the family and friends 
of a newspaper editor from Vienna. They had 
the literary instinct for local colour. 

The fishing of Hallstatt is at Obertraun. 
There is a level stretch of land above the lake, 
231 


LITTLE RIVERS 


where the river flows peaceably, and the fish 
have leisure to feed and grow. It is leased to a 
peasant, who makes a business of supplying the 
hotels with fish. He was quite willing to give 
permission to an angler; and I engaged one of 
his sons, a capital young fellow, whose natural 
capacities for good fellowship were only ham- 
pered by a most extraordinary German dialect, 
to row me across the lake, and carry the net 
and a small green barrel full of water to keep 
the fish alive, according to the custom of the 
country. The first day we had only four trout 
large enough to put into the barrel; the next 
day I think there were six; the third day, I 
remember very well, there were ten. They 
were pretty creatures, weighing from half a 
pound to a pound each, and coloured as daintily 
as bits of French silk, in silver gray with faint 
pink spots. 

There was plenty to do at Hallstatt in the 
mornings. An hour’s walk from the town there 
was a fine waterfall, three hundred feet high. 
On the side of the mountain above the lake was 
one of the salt-mines for which the region is 
celebrated. It has been worked for ages by 
many successive races, from the Celt downward. 
Perhaps even the men of the Stone Age knew 
of it, and came hither for seasoning to make the 
flesh of the cave-bear and the mammoth more 
palatable. Modern pilgrims are permitted to 
2S2 


TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN 


explore the long, wet, glittering galleries with a 
guide, and slide down the smooth wooden rollers 
which join the different levels of the mines. 
This pastime has the same fascination as sliding 
down the balusters; and it is said that even 
queens and princesses have been delighted with 
it. This is a touching proof of the fundamental 
simplicity and unity of our human nature. 

But by far the best excursion from Hallstatt 
was an all-day trip to the Zwieselalp — a moun- 
tain which seems to have been especially cre- 
ated as a point of view. From the bare summit 
you look right into the face of the huge, snowy 
Dachstein, with the wild lake of Gosau gleam- 
ing at its foot; and far away on the other side 
your vision ranges over a confusion of moun- 
tains, with all the white peaks of the Tyrol 
stretched along the horizon. Such a wide out- 
look as this helps the fisherman to enjoy the 
narrow beauties of his little rivers. No sport 
is at its best without interruption and contrast. 
To appreciate wading, one ought to climb a 
little on odd days. 

Ischl is about ten or twelve miles below Hall- 
statt, in the valley of the Traun. It is the 
fashionable summer-resort of Austria. I found 
it in the high tide of amusement. The shady 
esplanade along the river was crowded with 
brave women and fair men, in gorgeous rai- 
ment; the hotels were overflowing; and there 
233 


LITTLE RIVERS 


were various kinds of music and entertainments 
at all hours of day and night. But all this did 
not seem to affect the fishing. 

The landlord of the Konigin Elizabeth, who 
is also the Burgomaster and a gentleman of 
varied accomplishments and no leisure, kindly 
furnished me with a fishing license in the shape 
of a large pink card. There were many rules 
printed upon it: ‘‘All fishes under nine inches 
must be gently restored to the water. No in- 
strument of capture must be used except the 
angle in the hand. The card of legitimation 
must be produced and exhibited at the polite 
request of any of the keepers of the river.” 
Thus duly authorised and instructed, I sallied 
forth to seek my pastime according to the law. 

The easiest way, in theory, was to take the 
afternoon train up the river to one of the vil- 
lages, and fish down a mile or two in the even- 
ing, returning by the eight o’clock train. But 
in practice the habits of the fish interfered seri- 
ously with the latter part of this plan. 

On my first day I had spent several hours in 
the vain effort to catch something better than 
small grayling. The best time for the trout was 
just approaching, as the broad light faded from 
the stream; already they were beginning to 
feed, when I looked up from the edge of a pool 
and saw the train rattling down the valley be- 
low me. Under the circumstances the only 
234 


TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN 


thing to do was to go on fishing. It was an 
even pool with steep banks, and the water ran 
through it very straight and swift, some four 
feet deep and thirty yards across. As the tail- 
fiy reached the middle of the water, a fine trout 
literally turned a somersault over it, but with- 
out touching it. At the next cast he was ready, 
taking it with a rush that carried him into the 
air with the fiy in his mouth. He weighed 
three-quarters of a pound. The next one was 
equally eager in rising and sharp in playing, and 
the third might have been his twin sister or 
brother. So, after casting for hours and taking 
nothing in the most beautiful pools, I landed 
three trout from one unlikely place in fifteen 
minutes. That was because the trout’s supper- 
time had arrived. So had mine. I walked over 
to the rambling old inn at Goisern, sought the 
cook in the kitchen, and persuaded her, in spite 
of the lateness of the hour, to boil the largest of 
the fish for my supper, after which I rode peace- 
fully back to Ischl by the eleven o’clock train. 

For the future I resolved to give up the illu- 
sory idea of coming home by rail, and ordered 
a little one-horse carriage to meet me at some 
point on the high-road every evening at nine 
o’clock. In this way I managed to cover the 
whole stream, taking a lower part each day, 
from the lake of Hallstatt down to Ischl. 

There was one part of the river, near Laufen> 
235 


LITTLE RIVERS 


where the current was very strong and water- 
fally, broken by ledges of rock. Below these it 
rested in long, smooth reaches, much beloved 
by the grayling. There was no difficulty in 
getting two or three of them out of each run. 

The grayling has a quaint beauty. His ap- 
pearance is aesthetic, like a fish in a pre-Raphael- 
ite picture. His colour, in midsummer, is a 
golden gray, darker on the back, and with a 
few black spots just behind his gills, like patches 
put on to bring out the pallor of his complexion. 
He smells of wild thyme when he first comes out 
of the water, wherefore St. Ambrose of Milan 
complimented him in courtly fashion: ^'Quid 
specie tua gratius ? Quid odore fragrantius ? 
Quod mella fragrant, hoc tuo corpore spirasJ^ 
But the chief glory of the grayling is the large 
iridescent fin on his back. You see it cutting 
the water as he swims near the surface; and 
when you have him on the bank it arches over 
him like a rainbow. His mouth is under his 
chin, and he takes the fiy gently, by suction. 
He is, in fact, and to speak plainly, something 
of a sucker; but then he is a sucker idealised 
and refined, the fiower of the family. Charles 
Cotton, the ingenious young friend of Walton, 
was all wrong in calling the grayling ‘‘one of the 
deadest-hearted fishes in the world.” He fights 
and leaps and whirls, and brings his big fin to 
bear across the force of the current with a 
236 


TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN 


variety of tactics that would put his more aris- 
tocratic fellow-citizen, the trout, to the blush. 
Twelve of these pretty fellows, with a brace of 
good trout for the top, filled my big creel to the 
brim. And yet, such is the inborn hypocrisy 
of the human heart that I always pretended to 
myself to be disappointed because there were 
not more trout, and made light of the grayling 
as a thing of naught. 

The pink fishing license did not seem to be of 
much use. Its exhibition was demanded only 
twice. Once a river guardian, who was walk- 
ing down the stream with a Belgian Baron and 
encouraging him to continue fishing, climbed 
out to me on the end of a long embankment, 
and with proper apologies begged to be favoured 
with a view of my document. It turned out 
that his request was a favour to me, for it dis- 
covered the fact that I had left my fly-book, 
with the pink card in it, beside an old mill, a 
quarter of a mile up the stream. 

Another time I was sitting beside the road, 
trying to get out of a very long, wet, awkward 
pair of wading-stockings, an occupation which 
is unfavourable to tranquillity of mind, when a 
man came up to me in the dusk and accosted 
me wdth an absence of politeness which in Ger- 
man amounted to an insult. 

“Have you been fishing.^” 

“Why do you want to know.^’’ 

237 


LITTLE RIVERS 


‘‘Have you any right to fish?’’ 

“What right have you to ask?” 

“I am a keeper of the river. Wkere is your 
card?” 

“It is in my pocket. But pardon my curi- 
osity, where is your card ? ” 

This question appeared to paralyse him. He 
had probably never been asked for his card 
before. He went lumbering off in the dark- 
ness, muttering “My card? Unheard of! My 
card !” 

The routine of angling at Ischl was varied 
by an excursion to the Lake of St. Wolfgang 
and the Schafberg, an isolated mountain on 
whose rocky horn an inn has been built. It 
stands up almost like a bird-house on a pole, 
and commands a superb prospect; northward, 
across the rolling plain and the Bavarian forest; 
southward, over a tumultuous land of peaks and 
precipices. There are many lovely lakes in 
sight; but the loveliest of all is that which takes 
its name from the old saint who wandered hither 
from the country of the “furious Franks” and 
built his peaceful hermitage on the Falkenstein. 
What good taste some of those old saints had ! 

There is a venerable church in the village, 
with pictures attributed to Michael Wohlge- 
muth, and a chapel which is said to mark the 
spot where St. Wolfgang, who had lost his axe 
far up the mountain, found it, like Longfellow’s 
238 


TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN 

arrow, in an oak, and ‘‘still unbroke.” The 
tree is gone, so it was impossible to verify the 
story. But the saint’s well is there, in a pavil- 
ion, with a bronze image over it, and a profita- 
ble inscription to the effect that the poorer 
pilgrims, “who have come unprovided with 
either money or wine, should be jolly well con- 
tented to find the water so fine.” There is also 
a famous echo farther up the lake, which repeats 
six syllables with accuracy. It is a strange co- 
incidence that there are just six syllables in the 
name of “der heilige Wolfgang.” But when 
you translate it into English, the inspiration of 
the echo seems to be less exact. The sweetest 
thing about St. Wolfgang was the abundance of 
purple cyclamens, clothing the mountain mead- 
ows, and filling the air with delicate fragrance 
like the smell of lilacs around a New England 
farmhouse in early June. 

There was still one stretch of the river above 
Ischl left for the last evening’s sport. I re- 
member it so well: the long, deep place where 
the water ran beside an embankment of stone, 
and the big grayling poised on the edge of the 
shadow, rising and falling on the current as a 
kite rises and falls on the wind and balances 
back to the same position; the murmur of the 
stream and the hissing of the pebbles underfoot 
in the rapids as the swift water rolled them over 
and over; the odour of the fir-trees, and the 
239 


LITTLE RIVERS 


streaks of warm air in quiet places, and the 
faint whiffs of wood smoke wafted from the 
houses, and the brown flies dancing heavily up 
and down in the twilight; the last good pool, 
where the river was divided, the main part 
making a deep, narrow curve to the right, and 
the lesser part bubbling into it over a bed of 
stones with half-a-dozen tiny waterfalls, with a 
fine trout lying at the foot of each of them and 
rising merrily as the white fly passed over him 
— surely it was all very good, and a memory to 
be grateful for. And when the basket was full, 
it was pleasant to put off the heavy wading- 
shoes and the long rubber-stockings, and ride 
homeward in an open carriage through the 
fresh night air. That is as near to sybaritic 
luxury as a man should care to come. 

The lights in the cottages are twinkling like 
fire-flies, and there are small groups of people 
singing and laughing down the road. The 
honest fisherman reflects that this world is only 
a place of pilgrimage, but after all there is a 
good deal of cheer on the journey, if it is made 
with a contented heart. He wonders who the 
dwellers in the scattered houses may be, and 
weaves romances out of the shadows on the cur- 
tained windows. The lamps burning in the 
wayside shrines tell him stories of human love 
and patience and hope, and of divine forgive- 
ness. Dream-pictures of life float before him, 
240 


TROUT-PISHING IN THE TRAUN 

tender and luminous, filled with a vague, soft 
atmosphere in which the simplest outlines gain 
a strange significance. They are like some 
of Millet’s paintings — “The Sower,” or “The 
Sheepfold,” — ^there is very little detail in them; 
but sometimes a little means much. 

Then the moon floats up into the sky from 
behind the eastern hills, and the fisherman be- 
gins to think of home, and of the foolish, fond 
old rhymes about those whom the moon sees 
far away, and the stars that have the power to 
fulfil wishes — ^as if the celestial bodies knew or 
cared anything about our small feelings which 
we call affection and desires ! But if there 
were Some One above the moon and stars who 
did know and care. Some One who could see 
the places and the people that you and I would 
give so much to see. Some One who could do 
for them all of kindness that you and I fain 
would do. Some One able to keep our beloved 
in perfect peace and watch over the little chil- 
dren sleeping in their beds beyond the sea — 
what then.^ Why, then, in the evening hour, 
one might have thoughts of home that would go 
across the ocean by way of heaven, and be 
better than dreams, almost as good as prayers. 

1892 . 


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AT THE SIGN OP THE BALSAM 
BOUGH 


**Come live with me, and be my love. 

And we will all the 'pleasures prove 
That valleys, groves, or hills, or field. 

Or woods and sleepy mountains yield.** 

There we 'will rest our sleepy heads. 

And happy hearts, on balsam beds ; 

And every day go forth to fish 
In foamy streams for ouananiche. 

Old Song with a New Ending. 


AT THE SIGN OF THE BALSAM 
BOUGH 

TT has been asserted, on high philosophical 
^ authority, that woman is a problem. She is 
more; she is a cause of problems to others. 
This is not a theoretical statement. It is a 
fact of experience. 

Every year, when the sun passes the summer 
solstice, the 

Two souls with but a single thought, 

of whom I am so fortunate as to be one, are 
summoned by that feminine portion of our united 
mind which has at once the right of putting the 
question and of casting the deciding vote, to 
answer this conundrum: How can we go abroad 
without crossing the ocean, and abandon an 
interesting family of children without getting 
completely beyond their reach, and escape from 
the frying-pan of housekeeping without falling 
into the fire of the summer hotel This ap- 
parently insoluble problem we usually solve by 
going to camp in Canada. 

It is indeed a foreign air that breathes around 
us as we make the harmless, friendly voyage 
245 


LITTLE RIVERS 


from Point Levis to Quebec. The boy on the 
ferry-boat, who cajoles us into buying a copy of 
Le Moniteur containing last month’s news, has 
the address of a true though diminutive French- 
man. The landlord of the quiet little inn on 
the outskirts of the town welcomes us with Gal- 
lic effusion as well-known guests, and rubs his 
hands genially before us, while he escorts us to 
our apartments, groping secretly in his memory 
to recall our names. When we walk down the 
steep, quaint streets to revel in the purchase of 
moccasins and water-proof coats and camping 
supplies, we read on a wall the familiar but 
transformed legend, L^enfant pleurs, il veut son 
Camphoria, and remember with joy that no in- 
fant who weeps in French can impose any re- 
sponsibility upon us in these days of our re- 
newed honeymoon. 

But the true delight of the expedition begins 
when the tents have been set up, in the forest 
back of Lake St. John, and the green branches 
have been broken for the woodland bed, and 
the fire has been lit under the open sky, and, 
the livery of fashion being all discarded, I sit 
down at a log table to eat supper with my lady 
Greygown. Then life seems simple and amiable 
and well worth living. Then the uproar and 
confusion of the world die away from us, and we 
hear only the steady murmur of the river and 
the low voice of the wind in the tree-tops. 

246 


SIGN OP THE BALSAM BOUGH 


Then time is long, and the only art that is need- 
ful for its enjoyment is short and easy. Then 
we taste true comfort, while we lodge with 
Mother Green at the Sign of the Balsam Bough. 

I 

UNDER THE WHITE BIRCHES 

Men may say what they will in praise of 
their houses, and grow eloquent upon the merits 
of various styles of architecture, but, for our 
part, we are agreed that there is nothing to be 
compared with a tent. It is the most venerable 
and aristocratic form of human habitation. 
Abraham and Sarah lived in it, and shared its 
hospitality with angels. It is exempt from the 
base tyranny of the plumber, the paper-hanger, 
and the gas-man. It is not immovably bound 
to one dull spot of earth by the chains of a 
cellar and a system of water-pipes. It has a 
noble freedom of locomotion. It follows the 
wishes of its inhabitants, and goes with them, a 
travelling home, as the spirit moves them to 
explore the wilderness. At their pleasure, new 
beds of wild flowers surround it, new plantations 
of trees overshadow it, and new avenues of 
shining water lead to its ever-open door. What 
the tent lacks in luxury it makes up in liberty: 
or rather let us say that liberty itself is the 
greatest luxury. 


247 


LITTLE RIVERS 


Another thing is worth remembering — a fam- 
ily which lives in a tent never can have a skel- 
eton in the closet. 

But it must not be supposed that every spot 
in the woods is suitable for a camp, or that 
a good tenting-ground can be chosen without 
knowledge and forethought. One of the requi- 
sites, indeed, is to be found everywhere in the 
St. John region; for all the lakes and rivers are 
full of clear, cool water, and the traveller does 
not need to search for a spring. But it is always 
necessary to look carefully for a bit of smooth 
ground on the shore, far enough above the 
water to be dry, and slightly sloping, so that 
the head of the bed may be higher than the 
foot. Above all, it must be free from big stones 
and serpentine roots of trees. A root that 
looks no bigger than an inch-worm in the day- 
time assumes the proportions of a boa-con- 
strictor at midnight — ^when you find it under 
your hip-bone. There should also be plenty 
of evergreens near at hand for the beds. Spruce 
will answer at a pinch; it has an aromatic smell; 
but it is too stiff and humpy. Hemlock is 
smoother and more fiexible; but the spring soon 
wears out of it. The balsam-fir, le sapin, with 
its elastic branches and thick fiat needles, is the 
best of all. A bed of these boughs a foot deep 
is softer than a mattress and as fragrant as a 
thousand Christmas-trees. Two things more 
248 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 


are needed for the ideal camp-ground — an open 
situation, where the breeze will drive away the 
flies and mosquitoes, and an abundance of dry 
flrewood within easy reach. Yes, and a third 
thing must not be forgotten; for, says my lady 
Greygown: 

shouldn’t feel at home in camp unless I 
could sit in the door of the tent and look out 
over flowing water.” 

All these conditions are met in our favourite 
camping place below the flrst fall in the Grande 
Decharge. A rocky point juts out into the 
river and makes a flne landing for the canoes. 
There is a dismantled fishing-cabin a few rods 
back in the woods, from which we can borrow 
boards for a table and chairs. A group of cedars 
on the lower edge of the point opens just wide 
enough to receive and shelter our tent. At a 
good distance beyond ours, the guides’ tent is 
pitched; and the big camp-fire burns between 
the two dwellings. A pair of white birches lift 
their leafy crowns far above us, and after them 
we name the place Le Camp aux Bouleaux. 

‘‘Why not call trees people — since, if you 
come to live among them year after year, you 
will learn to know many of them personally, 
and an attachment will grow up between you 
and them individually.” So writes that Doctor 
Amabilis of woodcraft, W. C. Prime, in his book. 
Among the Northern Hills, and straightway 
249 


LITTLE RIVERS 


launches forth into eulogy on the white birch. 
And truly it is an admirable, lovable, and com- 
fortable tree, beautiful to look upon and full of 
various uses. Its wood is strong to make pad- 
dles and axe handles, and glorious to burn, 
blazing up at first with a flashing flame, and then 
holding the fire in its glowing heart all through 
the night. Its bark is the most serviceable of 
all the products of the wilderness. In Russia, 
they say, it is used in tanning, and gives its 
subtle, sacerdotal fragrance to Russia leather. 
But here, in the woods, it serves more primi- 
tive ends. It can be peeled off in a huge roll 
from some giant tree and fashioned into a swift 
canoe to carry man over the waters. It can be 
cut into square sheets to roof his shanty in the 
forest. It is the paper on which he writes his 
woodland despatches, and the flexible material 
which he bends into drinking-cups of silver 
lined with gold. A thin strip of it wrapped 
around the end of a candle and fastened in a 
cleft stick makes a practicable chandelier. A 
basket for berries, a horn to call the love-lorn 
moose through the autumnal woods, a canvas 
on which to draw the outline of great and mem- 
orable fish — ^all these and many other indis- 
pensable luxuries are stored up for the skilful 
woodsman in the birch bark. 

Only do not rob or mar the tree, unless you 
really need what it has to give you. Let it 
250 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 


stand and grow in virgin majesty, ungirdled and 
unscarred, while the trunk becomes a firm pillar 
of the forest temple, and the branches spread 
abroad a refuge of bright green leaves for the 
birds of the air. Nature never made a more 
excellent piece of handiwork. ‘‘And if,’’ said 
my lady Greygown, “I should ever become a 
dryad, I would choose to be transformed into a 
white birch. And then, when the days of my 
life were numbered, and the sap had ceased to 
flow, and the last leaf had fallen, and the dry 
bark hung around me in ragged curls and 
streamers, some wandering hunter would come 
in the wintry night and touch a lighted coal to 
my body, and my spirit would flash up in a 
fiery chariot into the sky.” 

The chief occupation of our idle days on the 
Grande Decharge was fishing. Above the camp 
spread a noble pool, more than two miles in cir- 
cumference, and diversified with smooth bays 
and whirling eddies, sand beaches and rocky 
islands. The river poured into it at the head, 
foaming and raging down a long chute, and 
swept out of it just in front of our camp in a 
merry, musical rapid. It was full of fish of 
various kinds — ^long-nosed pickerel, wall-eyed 
pike, and stupid chub. But the prince of the 
pool was the fighting ouananiche, the little sal- 
mon of St. John. 

Here let me chant thy praise, thou noblest 

251 


LITTLE RIVERS 


and most high-minded fish, the cleanest feeder, 
the merriest liver, the loftiest leaper, and the 
bravest warrior of all creatures that swim ! Thy 
cousin, the trout, in his purple and gold with 
crimson spots, wears a more splendid armour 
than thy russet and silver mottled with black, 
but thine is the kinglier nature. His courage 
and skill compared with thine 

^^Are as moonlight unto sunlight ^ and as water 
unto wine^ 

The old salmon of the sea who begot thee, long 
ago, in these inland waters, became a back- 
slider, descending again to the ocean, and grew 
gross and heavy with coarse feeding. But thou, 
unsalted salmon of the foaming floods, not 
landlocked, as men call thee, but choosing of 
thine own free-will to dwell on a loftier level, in 
the pure, swift current of a living stream, hast 
grown in grace and risen to a higher life. Thou 
art not to be measured by quantity, but by 
quality, and thy five pounds of pure vigour will 
outweigh a score of pounds of flesh less vital- 
ised by spirit. Thou feedest on the flies of the 
air, and thy food is transformed into an aerial 
passion for flight, as thou springest across the 
pool, vaulting toward the sky. Thine eyes 
have grown large and keen by peering through 
the foam, and the feathered hook that can de- 
ceive thee must be deftly tied and delicately 
252 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 


cast. Thy tail and fins, by ceaseless conflict 
with the rapids, have broadened and strength- 
ened, so that they can flash thy slender body 
like a living arrow up the fall. As Lancelot 
among the knights, so art thou among the fish, 
the plain armoured hero, the sunburnt champion 
of all the water-folk. 

Every morning and evening, Greygown and 
I would go out for ouananiche, and sometimes 
we caught plenty and sometimes few, but we 
never came back without a good catch of hap- 
piness. There were certain places where the 
fish liked to stay. For example, we always 
looked for one at the lower corner of a big rock, 
very close to it, where he could poise himself 
easily on the edge of the strong downward 
stream. Another likely place was a straight 
run of water, swift, but not too swift, with a 
sunken stone in the middle. The ouananiche 
does not like crooked, twisting water. An even 
current is far more comfortable, for then he 
discovers just how much effort is needed to 
balance against it, and keeps up the movement 
mechanically, as if he were half asleep. But 
his favourite place is under one of the floating 
islands of thick foam that gather in the corners 
below the falls. The matted flakes give a 
grateful shelter from the sun, I fancy, and 
almost all game-fish love to lie in the shade; 
but the chief reason why the ouananiche haunt 
253 . 


LITTLE RIVERS 


the drifting white mass is because it is full of 
flies and gnats, beaten down by the spray of 
the cataract, and sprinkled all through the 
foam like plums in a cake. To this natural 
confection the little salmon, lurking in his 
corner, plays the part of Jack Horner all day 
long, and never wearies. 

“See that helle hrou down below there!” said 
Ferdinand, as we scrambled over the huge rocks 
at the foot of the falls; “there ought to be sal- 
mon there en masseJ^ Yes, there were the 
sharp noses picking out the unfortunate insects, 
and the broad tails waving lazily through the 
foam as the fish turned in the water. At this 
season of the year, when summer is nearly 
ended, and every ouananiche in the Grande 
Decharge has tasted feathers or seen a hook, it 
is useless to attempt to delude them with the 
large gaudy flies which the fishing-tackle-maker 
recommends. There are only two successful 
methods of angling now. The first of these I 
tried, and by casting delicately with a tiny 
brown or yellow trout-fly tied on a gossamer 
strand of gut, captured a pair of fish weighing 
about three pounds each. They fought against 
the spring of the four-ounce rod for nearly half 
an hour before Ferdinand could slip the net 
around them. But there was another and a 
broader tail still waving disdainfully on the 
outer edge of the foam. “And now,” said the 
254 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 

gallant Ferdinand, ‘‘the turn is to madame, 
that she should prove her fortune — ^attend but 
a moment, madame, while I seek the sauterelle,’^ 
This was the second method: the grasshop- 
per was attached to the hook, and casting the 
line well out across the pool, Ferdinand put the 
rod into Greygown’s hands. She stood poised 
upon a pinnacle of rock, like patience on a 
monument, waiting for a bite. It came. There 
was a slow, gentle pull at the line, answered 
by a quick jerk of the rod, and a noble fish 
flashed into the air. Four pounds and a half at 
least ! He leaped again and again, shaking the 
drops from his silvery sides. He rushed up 
the rapids as if he had determined to return to 
the lake, and down again as if he had changed 
his plans and determined to go to the Sague- 
nay. He sulked in the deep water and rubbed 
his nose against the rocks. He did his best to 
treat that treacherous grasshopper as the whale 
served Jonah. But Greygown, through all her 
little screams and shouts of excitement, was 
steady and sage. She never gave the fish an 
inch of slack line; and at last he lay glittering 
on the rocks, with the black St. Andrew’s crosses 
clearly marked on his plump sides, and the iri- 
descent spots gleaming on his small, shapely 
head. ‘^Une belle!’" cried Ferdinand, as he 
held up the fish in triumph, “and it is madame 
who has the good fortune. She understands 
£55 


LITTLE RIVERS 


well to take the large fish — ^is it not?” Grey- 
gown stepped demurely down from her pin- 
nacle, and as we drifted down the pool in the 
canoe, under the mellow evening sky, her con- 
versation betrayed not a trace of the pride that 
a victorious fisherman would have shown. On 
the contrary, she insisted that angling was 
an affair of chance — ^which was consoling, though 
I knew it was not altogether true — ^and that the 
smaller fish were just as pleasant to catch and 
better to eat, after all. For a generous rival, 
commend me to a woman. And if I must 
compete, let it be with one who has the grace 
to dissolve the bitter of defeat in the honey 
of a mutual self-congratulation. 

We had a garden, and our favourite path 
through it was the portage leading around the 
falls. We travelled it very frequently, making 
an excuse of idle errands to the steamboat-land- 
ing on the lake, and sauntering along the trail 
as if school were out and would never keep 
again. It was the season of fruits rather than 
of flowers. Nature was reducing the decora- 
tions of her table to make room for the ban- 
quet. She offered us berries instead of blos- 
soms. 

There were the bright coral clusters of the 
dwarf cornel set in whorls of pointed leaves; 
and the deep blue balls of the Clintonia bore- 
alis (which the White Mountain people call the 
256 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 


bear-berry, and I hope the name will stick, for 
it smacks of the woods, and it is a shame to 
leave so free and wild a plant under the bur- 
den of a Latin name); and the gray, crimson- 
veined berries for which the Canada Mayflower 
had exchanged its feathery white bloom; and 
the ruby drops of the twisted stalk hanging like 
jewels along its bending stem. On the three- 
leaved table which once carried the gay flower 
of the wake-robin, there was a scarlet lump like 
a red pepper escaped to the forest and run wild. 
The partridge-vine was full of rosy provision 
for the birds. The dark tiny leaves of the 
creeping snow-berry were all sprinkled over 
with delicate drops of spicy foam. There were 
a few belated raspberries, and, if we chose to 
go out into the burnt ground, we could find 
blueberries in plenty. 

But there was still bloom enough to give that 
festal air without which the most abundant 
feast seems coarse and vulgar. The pale gold 
of the loosestrife had faded, but the deeper 
yellow of the goldenrod had begun to take its 
place. The blue banners of the fleur-de-lis had 
vanished from beside the springs, but the pur- 
ple of the asters was appearing. Closed gen- 
tians kept their secret inviolate, and bluebells 
trembled above the rocks. The quaint pinkish- 
white flowers of the turtle-head showed in wet 
places, and instead of the lilac racemes of the 
257 


LITTLE RIVERS 


purple-fringed orchis, which had disappeared 
with midsummer, we found now the slender 
braided spikes of the lady’s-tresses, latest and 
lowliest of the orchids, pale and pure as nuns 
of the forest, and exhaling a celestial fragrance. 
There is a secret pleasure in finding these deli- 
cate fiowers in the rough heart of the wilder- 
ness. It is like discovering the veins of poetry 
in the character of a guide or a lumberman. 
And to be able to call the plants by name 
makes them a hundredfold more sweet and 
intimate. 

Naming things is one of the oldest and sim- 
plest of human pastimes. Children play at it 
with their dolls and toy animals. In fact, it 
was the first game ever played on earth, for the 
Creator who planted the garden eastward in 
Eden knew well what would please the childish 
heart of man, when He brought all the new- 
made creatures to Adam, “to see what he would 
call them.” 

Our rustic bouquet graced the table under 
the white birches, while we sat by the fire and 
watched our four men at the work of the camp 
— ^Joseph and Raoul chopping wood in the dis- 
tance; Erangois slicing juicy rashers from the 
fiitch of bacon; and Ferdinand, the chef, heat- 
ing the frying-pan in preparation for supper. 

“Have you ever thought,” said Greygown, 
in a contented tone of voice, “that this is the 
258 


SIGN OP THE BALSAM BOUGH 


only period of our existence when we attain to 
the luxury of a French cook?’’ 

"‘And one with the grand manner, too,” I 
replied, “for he never fails to ask what it is 
that madame desires to eat to-day, as if the 
larder of Lucullus were at his disposal, though 
he knows well enough that the only choice lies 
between broiled fish and fried fish, or bacon 
with eggs and a rice omelet. But I like the 
fiction of a lordly ordering of the repast. How 
much better it is than having to eat what is 
flung before you at a summer boarding-house 
by a scornful waitress !” 

“Another thing that pleases me,” continued 
my lady, “is the unbreakableness of the dishes. 
There are no nicks in the edges of the best 
plates here; and, oh ! it is a happy thing to 
have a home without bric-a-brac. There is 
nothing here that needs to be dusted.” 

“And no engagements for to-morrow,” I 
ejaculated. “Dishes that can’t be broken, and 
plans that can — ^that’s the ideal of house- 
keeping.” 

“And then,” added my philosopher in skirts, 
“it is certainly refreshing to get away from all 
one’s relations for a little while.” 

“But how do you make that out?” I asked, 
in mild surprise. “What are you going to do 
with me?” 

“Oh,” said she, with a fine air of independ- 
259 


LITTLE RIVERS 


ence, ‘T don’t count you. You are not a re- 
lation, only a connection by marriage.” 

“Well, my dear,” I answered, between the 
meditative puffs of my pipe, “it is good to con- 
sider the advantages of our present situation. 
We shall soon come into the frame of mind of 
the Sultan of Morocco when he camped in the 
Vale of Rabat. The place pleased him so well 
that he staid until the very pegs of his tent 
took root and grew up into a grove of trees 
around his pavilion.” 


II 

KENOGAMI 

The guides were a little restless under the 
idle regime of our lazy camp, and urged us to 
set out upon some adventure. Ferdinand was 
like the uncouth swain in Lycidas. Packing 
the bundles of camp equipage into the canoes, 
and crying, — 

To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new^^ 

he led us forth to seek the famous fishing 
grounds on Lake Kenogami. 

We skirted the eastern end of Lake St. John 
in our two canoes, and pushed up La Belle 
Riviere to Hebertville, where all the children 
turned out to follow our procession through the 
260 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 


village. It was like the train that tagged after 
the Pied Piper of Hamelin. We embarked 
again, surrounded by an admiring throng, at 
the bridge where the main street crossed a little 
stream, and paddled up it, through a score of 
back yards and a stretch of reedy meadows, 
where the wild and tame ducks fed together, 
tempting the sportsman to sins of ignorance. 
We crossed the placid Lac Vert, and after a 
carry of a mile along the high-road toward 
Chicoutimi, turned down a steep hill and 
pitched our tents on a crescent of silver sand, 
with the long, fair water of Kenogami before 
us. 

It is amazing to see how quickly these woods- 
men can make a camp. Each one knew pre- 
cisely his share of the enterprise. One sprang 
to chop a dry spruce log into fuel for a quick 
fire, and fell a harder tree to keep us warm 
through the night. Another stripped a pile of 
boughs from a balsam for the beds. Another 
cut the tent-poles from a neighbouring thicket. 
Another unrolled the bundles and made ready 
the cooking utensils. As if by magic, the mir- 
acle of the camp was accomplished. — 

The bed was made, the room was fit. 

By 'punctual eve the stars were liV ^ — 

but Greygown always insists upon completing 
261 


LITTLE RIVERS 


that quotation from Stevenson in her own voice; 
for this is the way it ends, — 

^^When we put up, my ass and I, 

At God's green caravanserai," 

Our permanent camp was another day’s voy- 
age down the lake, on a beach opposite the 
Pointe aux Sables, There the water was con- 
tracted to a narrow strait, and in the swift cur- 
rent, close to the point, the great trout had 
fixed their spawning-bed from time immemorial. 
It was the first week in September, and the 
magnates of the lake were already assembling 
— ^the Common Councilmen and the Mayor 
and the whole Committee of Seventy. There 
were giants in that place, rolling lazily about, 
and chasing each other on the surface of the 
water. ‘‘Look, M’sieu’!” cried Francois, in 
excitement, as we lay at anchor in the gray 
morning twilight; “one like a horse has just 
leaped behind us; I assure you, big like a horse !” 

But the fish were shy and dour. Old Cas- 
tonnier, the guardian of the lake, lived in his 
hut on the shore, and flogged the water, early 
and late, every day with his home-made flies. 
He was anchored in his dugout close beside us, 
and grinned with delight as he saw his over- 
educated trout refuse my best casts. “They 
are here, M’sieu’, for you can see them,” he 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 


said, by way of discouragement, ‘‘but it is diffi- 
cult to take them. Do you not find it so 

In the back of my fly-book I discovered a 
tiny phantom minnow — a dainty affair of var- 
nished silk, as light as a feather — ^and quietly 
attached it to the leader in place of the tail- 
fly. Then the fun began. 

One after another the big flsh dashed at that 
deception, and we played and netted them, un- 
til our score was thirteen, weighing altogether 
thirty-five pounds, and the largest five pounds 
and a half. The guardian was mystified and 
disgusted. He looked on for a while in silence, 
and then pulled up anchor and clattered ashore. 
He must have made some inquiries and reflec- 
tions during the day, for that night he paid a 
visit to our camp. After telling bear stories 
and fish stories for an hour or two by the fire, 
he rose to depart, and tapping his forefinger 
solemnly upon my shoulder, delivered himself 
as follows: — 

‘‘You can say a proud thing when you go 
home, M’sieu’ — that you have beaten the old 
Castonnier. There are not many fishermen 
who can say that. But,” he added, with con- 
fidential emphasis, ^^c'etait voire sacre pHit pois- 
son qui a fait celaJ^ 

That was a touch of human nature, my rusty 
old guardian, more welcome to me than all the 
morning’s catch. Is there not always a “con- 
263 


LITTLE RIVERS 


founded little minnow” responsible for our fail- 
ures? Did you ever see a school-boy tumble 
on the ice without stooping immediately to re- 
buckle the strap of his skates ? And would not 
Ignotus have painted a masterpiece if he could 
have found good brushes and a proper canvas ? 
Life’s shortcomings would be bitter indeed if 
we could not find excuses for them outside of 
ourselves. And as for life’s successes — ^well, it 
is certainly wholesome to remember how many 
of them are due to a fortunate position and the 
proper tools. 

Our tent was on the border of a coppice of 
young trees. It was pleasant to be awakened 
by a convocation of birds at sunrise, and to 
watch the shadows of the leaves dance out upon 
our translucent roof of canvas. 

All the birds in the bush are early, but there 
are so many of them that it is difficult to be- 
lieve that every one can be rewarded with a 
worm. Here in Canada those little people of 
the air who appear as transient guests of spring 
and autumn in the Middle States, are in their 
summer home and breeding-place. Warblers, 
named for the magnolia and the myrtle, chest- 
nut-sided, bay-breasted, blue-backed, and black- 
throated, flutter and creep along the branches 
with simple lisping music. Kinglets, ruby- 
crowned and golden-crowned, tiny, brilliant 
sparks of life, twitter among the trees, break- 
264 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 

ing occasionally into clearer, sweeter songs. 
Companies of redpolls and crossbills pass chirp- 
ing through the thickets, busily seeking their 
food. The fearless, familiar chickadee repeats 
his name merrily, while he leads his family to 
explore every nook and cranny of the wood. 
Cedar wax-wings, sociable wanderers, arrive in 
numerous flocks. The Canadians call them 
^^recolletSy’ because they wear a brown crest of 
the same colour as the hoods of the monks who 
came with the flrst settlers to New France. 
They are a songless tribe, although their quick, 
reiterated call as they take to flight has given 
them the name of chatterers. The beautiful 
tree-sparrows and the pine-siskins are more 
melodious, and the slate-coloured juncos, flit- 
ting about the camp, are as garrulous as chippy- 
birds. All these varied notes come and go 
through the tangle of morning dreams. And 
now the noisy blue-jay is calling “ Thief — thief — 
thief in the distance, and a pair of great 
pileated woodpeckers with crimson crests are 
laughing loudly in the swamp over some family 
joke. But listen ! what is that harsh creaking 
note? It is the cry of the Northern shrike, of 
whom tradition says that he catches little birds 
and impales them on sharp thorns. At the 
sound of his voice the concert closes suddenly 
and the singers vanish into thin air. The hour 
of music is over; the commonplace of day has 
265 


LITTLE RIVERS 


begun. And there is my lady Greygown, al- 
ready up and dressed, standing by the break- 
fast-table and laughing at my belated appear- 
ance. 

But the birds were not our only musicians at 
Kenogami. French Canada is one of the an- 
cestral homes of song. Here you can still listen 
to those quaint ballads which were sung cen- 
turies ago in Normandie and Provence. 
la Claire Foniaine^^ Dans Paris y a4-une Prune 
'plus Belle que le Jour,’" ''Sur le Pont JCAvignon,^ 
^^En Roulant ma Boule^^ ^^La Poulette Grise/^ 
and a hundred other folk-songs linger among 
the peasants and voyageurs of these northern 
woods. You may hear 

Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre — 
Mironton, mirontouy mirontaine,^’ 

and 

^^Isabeau s^y promene 
Le long de son jardin^^ 

chanted in the farmhouse or the lumber shanty, 
to the tunes which have come down from an 
unknown source, and never lost their echo in 
the hearts of the people. 

Our Ferdinand was a perfect fountain of 
music. He had a clear tenor voice, and solaced 
every task and shortened every voyage with 
melody. ‘"A song, Ferdinand, a jolly song,’’ 
266 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 

the other men would say, as the canoes went 
sweeping down the quiet lake. And then the 
leader would strike up a well-known air, and 
his companions would come in on the refrain, 
keeping time with the stroke of their paddles. 
Sometimes it would be a merry ditty: 

My father had no girl hut me. 

And yet he sent me off to sea ; 

Leap, my little Cecilia,'' 

Or perhaps it was: 

‘‘I 've danced so much the livelong day , — 
Dance, my sweetheart, let 's be gay , — 

I 've fairly danced my shoes away , — 

Till evening. 

Dance, my pretty, dance once more ; 
Dance, until we break the floor 

But more frequently the song was touched with 
a plaintive pleasant melancholy. The min- 
strel told how he had gone into the woods and 
heard the nightingale, and she had confided to 
him that lovers are often unhappy. The story 
of La Belle Frangoise was repeated in minor 
cadences — ^how her sweetheart sailed away to 
the wars, and when he came back the village 
church bells were ringing, and he said to him- 
self that Frangoise had been faithless, and the 
chimes were for her marriage; but when he 
267 


LITTLE RIVERS 


entered the church it was her funeral that he 
saw, for she had died of love. It is strange 
how sorrow charms us when it is distant and 
visionary. Even when we are happiest we en- 
joy making music 

‘^0/ oldi unha'p'py^ far-off things.’'^ 

“What is that song which you are singing, 
Ferdinand.^” asks the lady, as she hears him 
humming behind her in the canoe. 

“Ah, madame, it is the chanson of a young 
man who demands of his blonde why she will 
not marry him. He says that he has waited 
long time, and the flowers are falling from the 
rose-tree, and he is very sad.” 

“And does she give a reason.^” 

“Yes, madame — ^that is to say, a reason of 
a certain sort; she declares that she is not quite 
ready; he must wait until the rose-tree adorns 
itself again.” 

“And what is the end — ^do they get married 
at last ? ” 

“But I do not know, madame. The chan- 
son does not go so far. It ceases with the com- 
plaint of the young man. And it is a very 
uncertain affair — ^this affair of the heart — ^is it 
notr 

Then, as if he turned from such perplexing 
mysteries to something plain and sure and easy 
268 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 


to understand, he breaks out into the jolliest 
of all Canadian songs: 

My baric canoe that flies ^ that flies , 

Hola ! my bark canoe /” 

III 

THE ISLAND POOL 

Among the mountains there is a gorge. And 
in the gorge there is a river. And in the river 
there is a pool. And in the pool there is an 
island. And on the island, for four happy 
days, there was a camp. 

It was by no means an easy matter to estab- 
lish ourselves in that lonely place. The river, 
though not remote from civilisation, is practi- 
cally inaccessible for nine miles of its course 
by reason of the steepness of its banks, which 
are long, shaggy precipices, and the fury of 
its current, in which no boat can live. We 
heard its voice as we approached through the 
forest, and could hardly tell whether it was far 
away or near. 

There is a perspective of sound as well as of 
sight, and one must have some idea of the size 
of a noise before one can judge of its distance. 
A mosquito’s horn in a dark room may seem 
like a trumpet on the battlements; and the 
tumult of a mighty stream heard through an 
269 


LITTLE RIVERS 


unknown stretch of woods may appear like the 
babble of a mountain brook close at hand. 

But when we came out upon the bald fore- 
head of a burnt clifiP and looked down, we real- 
ised the grandeur and beauty of the unseen 
voice that we had been following. A river of 
splendid strength went leaping through the 
chasm five hundred feet below us, and at the 
foot of two snow-white falls, in an oval of dark 
topaz water, traced with curves of fioating foam, 
lay the solitary island. 

The broken path was like a ladder. ‘‘How 
shall we ever get down.^” sighed Greygown, as 
we dropped from rock to rock; and at the bot- 
tom she looked up sighing, “I know we never 
can get back again.” There was not a foot of 
ground on the shores level enough for a tent. 
Our canoe ferried us over, two at a time, to the 
island. It was about a hundred paces long, 
composed of round, coggly stones, with just one 
patch of smooth sand at the lower end. There 
was not a tree left upon it larger than an alder- 
bush. The tent-poles must be cut far up on 
the mountain-sides, and every bough for our 
beds must be carried down the ladder of rocks. 
But the men were gay at their work, singing 
like mocking-birds. After all, the glow of life 
comes from friction with its difficulties. If we 
cannot find them at home, we sally abroad 
270 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 

and create them, just to warm up our met- 
tle. 

The ouananiche in the island pool were su- 
perb, astonishing, incredible. We stood on the 
cobble-stones at the upper end, and cast our 
little flies across the sweeping stream, and for 
three days the fish came crowding in to fill the 
barrel of pickled salmon for our guides’ winter 
use; and the score rose, — ^twelve, twenty-one, 
thirty-two; and the size of the ‘‘biggest fish” 
steadily mounted — ^four pounds, four and a 
half, five, five and three-quarters. “Precisely 
almost six pounds,” said Ferdinand, holding the 
scales; “but we may call him six, M’sieu’, for 
if it had been to-morrow that we had caught 
him, he would certainly have gained the other 
ounce.” And yet, why should I repeat the 
fisherman’s folly of writing down the record of 
that marvellous catch We always do it, but 
we know that it is a vain thing. Few listen to 
the tale, and none accept it. Does not Chris- 
topher North, reviewing the Salmonia of Sir 
Humphry Davy, mock and jeer unfeignedly at 
the fish stories of that most reputable writer.? 
But, on the very next page, old Christopher 
himself meanders on into a perilous narrative 
of the day when he caught a whole cart-load 
of trout in a Highland loch. Incorrigible, happy 
inconsistency ! Slow to believe others, and full 
271 


LITTLE RIVERS 


of sceptical inquiry, fond man never doubts one 
thing — that somewhere in the world a tribe of 
gentle readers will be discovered to whom his 
fish stories will appear credible. 

One of our days on the island was Sunday — 
a day of rest in a week of idleness. We had a 
few books; for there are some in existence which 
will stand the test of being brought into close 
contact with nature. Are not John Burroughs’ 
cheerful, kindly essays full of woodland truth 
and companionship ? Can you not carry a 
whole library of musical philosophy in your 
pocket in Matthew Arnold’s volume of selec- 
tions from Wordsworth? And could there be 
a better sermon for a Sabbath in the wilderness 
than Mrs. Slosson’s immortal story of FishirC 
Jimmy? 

But to be very frank about the matter, the 
camp is not stimulating to the studious side of 
my mind. Charles Lamb, as usual, has said 
what I feel: ‘T am not much a friend to out- 
of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits to 
it.” 

There are blueberries growing abundantly 
among the rocks — ^huge clusters of them, bloomy 
and luscious as the grapes of Eshcol. The 
blueberry is nature’s compensation for the ruin 
of forest fires. It grows best where the woods 
have been burned away and the soil is too poor 
272 


SIGN OP THE BALSAM BOUGH 

to raise another crop of trees. Surely it is an 
innocent and harmless pleasure to wander along 
the hillsides gathering these wild fruits, as the 
Master and His disciples once walked through 
the fields and plucked the ears of corn, never 
caring what the Pharisees thought of that new 
way of keeping the Sabbath. 

And here is a bed of moss beside a dashing 
rivulet, inviting us to rest and be thankful. 
Hark! There is a white-throat sparrow, on a 
little tree across the river, whistling his after- 
noon song 

In the linked sweetness long drawn ouL^^ 

Down in Maine they call him the Peabody-bird, 
because his notes sound to them like Old man 
— Peabody^ peabody, peabody. In New Bruns- 
wick the Scotch settlers say that he sings Ldst 
— I5st — Kennedy^ kennedy, kennedy. But here 
in his northern home I think we can under- 
stand him better. He is singing again and 
again, with a cadence that never wearies, '‘Sweet 
— sweet — Canada, Canada, Canada C The Cana- 
dians, when they came across the sea, remem- 
bering the nightingale of southern France, bap- 
tised this little gray minstrel their rossignol, 
and the country ballads are full of his praise. 
Every land has its nightingale, if we only have 
the heart to hear him. How distinct his voice 
273 


LITTLE RIVERS 


is — ^how personal, how confidential, as if he had 
a message for us ! 

There is a breath of fragrance on the cool 
shady air beside our little stream, that seems 
familiar. It is the first week of September. 
Can it be that the twin-fiower of June, the 
delicate Linncea borealis, is blooming again? 
Yes, here is the threadlike stem lifting its two 
frail pink bells above the bed of shining leaves. 
How dear an early flower seems when it comes 
back again and unfolds its beauty in a St. 
Martin’s summer ! How delicate and suggestive 
is the faint, magical odour ! It is like a renewal 
of the dreams of youth. 

‘‘And need we ever grow old?” asked my 
lady Greygown, as she sat that evening with 
the twin-flower on her breast, watching the 
stars come out along the edge of the cliffs, and 
tremble on the hurrying tide of the river. 
“Must we grow old as well as gray? Is the 
time coming when all life will be commonplace 
and practical, and governed by a dull ‘of 
course’? Shall we not always find adventures 
and romances, and a few blossoms returning, 
even when the season grows late?” 

“At least,” I answered, “let us believe in the 
possibility, for to doubt it is to destroy it. If 
we can only come back to nature together every 
year, and consider the flowers and the birds, 
and confess our faults and mistakes and our 
274 


SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH 


unbelief under the silent stars, and hear the 
river murmuring our absolution, we shall die 
young, even though we live long. We shall have 
a treasure of memories which will be like the 
twin-flower, always a double blossom on a single 
stem, and carry with us into the unseen world 
something which will make it worth while to 
be immortal.” 

1894. 





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A SONG AFTER SUNDOWN 




THE WOOD-NOTES OF THE VEERY 


The moonbeams ofoer Amo^s vale in silver flood were 'pour- 
ing. 

When flrst I heard the nightingale a long-lost love deplor- 
ing : 

So passionate, so full of pain, it sounded strange and eerie, 

I longed to hear a simpler strain, the wood-notes of the 
veer'y. 

The laverock sings a bonny lay, above the Scottish heather. 

It sprinkles from the dome of day like light and love together ; 

He drops the golden notes to greet his brooding mate, his 
dearie ; 

I only know one song more sweet, the vespers of the veery. 

In English gardens green and bright, and rich in fruity 
treasure, 

I ^ve heard the blackbird 'with delight repeat his merry 
measure ; 

The ballad was a lively one, the tune was loud and cheery. 

And yet 'with every setting sun I listened for the veery. 

279 


LITTLE RIVERS 


0 far away, and far away, the tawny thrush is singing. 
New England woods at close of day with that clear chant 

are ringing ; 

And when my light of life is low, and heart and flesh are 
weary, 

1 fain would hear, before I go, the wood-notes of the veery. 

1895. 


280 


INDEX 





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INDEX 


AfiFection, misplaced; an instance 
of, 133, 134. 

Altnaharra, 96. 

Alt-Prags, the Baths of : their 
venerable appearance, 169. 

Ambrose, of Milan: his compli- 
ment to the Grayling, 236. 

Ampersand: derivation of the 
name, 61; the mountain, 62; 
the lake, 76; the river, 63. 

Ananias: a point named after 
him, 212. 

Anglers: the pretensions of rus- 
tic, exposed, 26; a group of, 50, 
51; a friendly folk, 123, 124. 

Angling: its attractions, 3-5; an 
education in, 37 ff.; Dr. Paley’s 
attachment to, 116; a bene- 
faction to fish, 135. 

Antinoiis: the cause of his death, 
15. 

Architecture: prevailing style on 
the Ristigouche, 122; the su- 
periority of a tent to other 
forms of, 247; domestic types in 
Canada, 199, 200. 

Arnold, Matthew: quoted, 120. 

Aussee, 225. 

Baldness: in mountains and men, 
74. 

Barrie, J. M., 84. 

Bartlett, Virgil: a tribute to his 
memory, 63, 64. 

Bear-stories: their ubiquity, 54. 

Bellinghausen, von MUnch: 
quoted, 245. 


Birds: a good way to make their 
acquaintance, 21; differences in 
character, 22-24; a convocation 
of, 264. 

Birds named: 

Blackbird, 279. 

Bluebird, 4, 22. 

Cat-bird, 21. 

Cedar-bird, 264, 265. 
Chewink, 4, 22. 

Chickadee, 265. 

Crossbill, 265. 

Crow, Hoodie, 99. 

Cuckoo, 160. 

Ducks, “Betseys,” 192. 

Eagle, 96. 

Grouse, Ruffed, 71. 

Gull, 192. 

Jay, Blue, 23, 265. 

Kingfisher, 23, 138, 192. 
Kinglet, ruby, and golden- 
crowned, 264. 

Laverock, 279. 

Meadow-lark, 4. 

Nightingale, 273, 279. 

Oriole, 22. 

Owl, Great Horned, 54. 
Pewee, Wood, 22. 

Pine-Siskin, 265. 

Redpoll, 265. 

Robin, 3, 22. 

Sand-piper, Spotted, 22. 
Sheldrake, 68. 

Shrike, 265. 

Sky-lark, 159, 279. 

Sparrow, Song, 4, 22. 

Sparrow, Tree, 265. 


283 


INDEX 


Birds named: 

Sparrow, White-throated, 137, 
273. 

Thistle-bird, 4. 

Thrush, Hermit, 4, 24. 

Thrush, Wood, 24. 

Thrush, Wilson’s, 24, 279, 
280. 

Veery, 24, 279, 280. 

Warbler, black-throated green, 
71. 

Warbler, various kinds of 
Canada, 264. 

Woodpecker, 27, 28. 

Woodpecker, Great-pileated, 
265. 

Woodpecker, Red-headed, 71. 

Yellow-throat, Maryland, 22. 

Bishops: the proper costume for, 
27; a place frequented by, 151. 

Black, William: his “Princess of 
Thule,” 85 ff. 

Black-fly: his diabolical nature, 
205. 

Blackmore, R. D.: quoted, 34. 

Blunderhead: a winged idiot, 204. 

Boats: Adirondack, 66. 

Bonaparte, Napoleon: as a com- 
rade on foot, 16. 

Bridges, Robert: quoted, 82. 

Burroughs, John: his views on 
walking, 60; his essays, 272. 

Byron, George, Lord: misquoted, 
233, 234. 

Cambridge: looks best from the 
rear, 19. 

Camping-out: a first experience, 
52-55; lessons to be learned 
from it, 56; discretion needed in, 
248; skill of guides in prepara- 
tion for, 261. 

Character: expressed in looks, 13. 


Chub: a mean fish, 228, 229. 

Cities: enlivened by rivers, 19. 

Conservatism: Scotch style of, 94. 

Contentment: an example of, 260. 

Conversation: best between two, 
108; the most valuable kind, 
110; egoism the salt of, 132; the 
fine art of, 138, 139; current coin 
in, 206. 

Cook: the blessing of having a 
good-humoured, 193, 194. 

Cortina, 151-163. 

Cotton, Charles: quoted, 236. 

Courtesy: in a custom-house of- 
ficer, 149; among the Tyrolese 
peasants, 175; of a French 
Canadian, 194. 

Cow-boy: pious remark of a, 30. 

Cowley, Abraham: on littleness, 
16, 17. 

Credulity: of anglers in regard to 
their own fish-stories, 271. 

Crockett, S. R.: quoted, 25, 86. 

Darwin, Charles: quoted, 27, 28. 

Davy, Sir Humphry: quoted, 116. 

Deer-himting: in the Adirondacks, 

68 . 

Depravity, total: in trout, 101. 

Diogenes: as a bedfellow, 15. 

Dolomites: described, 144-146 ff. 

Driving: four-in-hand, 146; after 
dinner, 148; the French Can- 
adian idea of, 198. 

Economy: an instance of, 201. 

Education: a wise method of, 37, 
38. 

Education: in a canoe, 195. 

Edwards, Jonathan: his love of 
nature, 27, 28. 

Egoism, modest: the salt of con- 
versation, 132. 


284 


INDEX 


Epics: not to be taken as discour- 
agement to lyrics, 30. 

Epigrams : of small practical value, 
109, 110. 

Failures: the philosophic way of 
accounting for, 263. 

Fame: the best kind of, 154. 
Farming: demoralised on the 
Ristigouche, 121, 122. 

Fashion: unnecessary for a well- 
dressed woman to follow, 156. 
Fatherhood: the best type of, 37, 
38; its significance, 195. 

Fiction: its uses, 83-85, 89. 

Fish: fact that the largest always 
escape, 127. 

Flowers named: 

Alpenrosen, 144, 160, 176. 
Anemone, 4. 

Arrow-head, 12. 

Asters, 21, 257. 

Bear-berry (Clintonia bore- 
alis), 256. 

Bee-balm, 21. 

Blue-bells, 257, 258. 

Canada May-flower, 257. 
Cardinal flower, 21. 
Cinquefoil, 21. 

Clover, 159. 

Crowfoot,’^21. 

Cyclamen, 191, 245. 

Dahlia, 199. 

Daisy, ox-eye, 12. 

Dandelion, 4. 

Dwarf cornel, 256. 

Fire weed, 201. 

Fleur-de-lis, 191, 257. 
Forget-me-not, 159. 

Fuchsia, 99. 

Gentian, Alpine, 159. 
Gentian, closed, 21, 214, 257. 
Golden-rod, 21, 257. 


Flowers named: 

Hare-bell, 21. 

> Heather, 17, 83 ff. 

Hepatica, 21. 

Hollyhock, 199. 

Honey-suckle, 95, 96. 
Jewel-weed, 21, 214. 

Joe-Pye weed, 214. 
Knot-weed, 12. 

Ladies’-tresses, 258. 

Lilac, 35, 239. 

Loose-Strife, yellow, 21, 257. 
Marigold, 117, 118. 
Meadow-rue, 191. 

Orchis, purple-fringed, 21, 
191, 257, 258. 

Pansy, 175. 

Partridge-berry, 257. 

Polygala, fringed, 87. 

Pyrola, 191. 

Rose, 35, 99, 107. 

Santa Lucia, 159. 

Self-heal, 21. 

Snow-berry, 257. 
Spring-beauty, 21. 

St. John’s-wort, 21. 

Star-grass, 21. 

Tansy, 35. 

Trillium, painted, 21. 

Tulips, 3. 

Turtle-head, 257, 258. 
Twinflower, 15, 195. 
Twisted-stalk, 257. 

Violet, 21. 

Wake-Robin, 257. 

Flowers: Nature’s embroidery, 20, 
21, 159, 191, 256; the pleasure 
of knowing by name, 258; sec- 
ond bloom of, 274, 275. 

Forests: the mid-day silence of, 71; 
flowers in, 159, 160, 191, 256- 
258. 

Friendship: the great not always 


285 


INDEX 


adapted for it, 15; pleasure in 
proximity, 12; a celestial gift, 
106. 

Gay, John: quoted, 9. 

Germans: their sentiment, 163, 
164; their genius for thorough- 
ness, 166; their politeness, 237. 

Gilbert, W. S.: quoted, 37. 

Goat’s-milk: the proper way to 
drink it, 144; obliging disposition 
of the goat in regard to it, 177. 

Gray, Thomas: quoted, 24. 

Grayling: described, 234-237. 

Gross- Venediger: the, 176-179. 

Guides: Adirondack, 67; Canadian, 
192-196. 

Halleck, Fitz-Greene: quoted, 206. 

Hallstatt, 230. 

Haste: the folly of, 124, 125. 

Hazlitt, William: quoted, 222. 

Heine, Heinrich: quoted, 191. 

Hoosier Schoolmaster, the: the 
solidity of his views, 13. 

Hornet: the unexpected quality of 
his sting, 69, 70. 

Horse-yacht: a description of, 117; 
drawbacks and advantages, 124, 
125. 

Hospitality: in a Highland cot- 
tage, 99, 100; among anglers, 
123; in an Alpine hut, 177. 

Housekeeping: the ideal, 259. 

Human nature: best seen in little 
ways, 27, 28; a touch of, 261. 

Humour: American, difficult for 
foreigners, 151; plain, best en- 
joyed out-of-doors, 188, 189. 

Idealist: a boy is the true, 45. 

Ideals: the advantage of cherish- 
ing, 200. 


Idleness: occasionally profitable, 
30. 

Immortality: the hope of. 111; 
love makes it worth having, 275. 

Indian: the noble, 206. 

Insects: classified according to 
malignity, 204 ff. 

Ischi, 233, 234. 

James, Henry: his accuracy in 
words, 27. 

Johnson, Robert Underwood: 
quoted, 20, 21. 

Kenogami, Lake, 260 ff. 

Lairg, 119. 

Lake George, 39 ff. 

Lamb, Charles: his poor opinion of 
aqueducts, 12; his disinclination 
to reading out-of-doors, 272. 

Landro, 166, 167. 

Lanier, Sidney: quoted, 25. 

Lienz, 170 ff. 

Life: more in it than making a liv- 
ing, 30-32. 

Littleness: praised, 15, 16. 

London: the way to see, 19. 

Love: a boy’s introduction to, 43; 
a safe course in, 85, 86; the true 
meaning of, 113; uncertainty of 
its course, 268. 

Lowell, James Russell: a reminis- 
cence of him, 10. 

Luck: defined, 56. 

Lucretius, T.: quoted, 16. 

Lumbermen: their share in mak- 
ing our homes, 219. 

Mabie, Hamilton W.: quoted, 182. 

“Maclaren, Ian,” 85. 


286 


INDEX 


Manners: their charm, when plain 
and good, 175. 

Marvell, Andrew: quoted, 190. 

Medicinal Springs: an instance of 
their harmlessness, 52, 53. 

Meditation: an aid to, 136; on the 
building of a house, 219; at 
night-fall, 239. 

Melvich, 98. 

Memory: associated with odours, 
35; capricious, 103; awakened by 
a word, 183; sweetest when 
shared by two, 275. 

Metapedia, 117. 

Midges: animated pepper, 191. 

Milton, John: quoted, 260, 273. 

Mint: a symbol of remembrance, 
36, 37. 

Misurina, Lake, 164. 

Mountains: their influence, 10; 
invitations to climb, 61, 62; 
growth of trees upon them, 72- 
74; the Adirondacks, 76; the 
Dolomites, 144 ff.; the Hohe 
Tauem, 172 ff.; of the Salzkam- 
mergut, 224 ff. 

Mountain-climbing: charms of, 69 
ff.; moderation in, 158; disap- 
pointment in, 178, 179. 

Mosquito: his mitigating qual- 
ities, 205. 

Naaman, the Syrian: his senti- 
ment about rivers, 15. 

Naming things: pleasure of, 258. 

Navigable rivers: deflned, 52. 

Neu-Prags: the Baths of, 169. 

Noah: a question about, 139. 

Nuvolau, Mount, 158 ff. 

Old Age: sympathy with youth, 
108; the wisdom and beauty of, 
110, 111; preparation for, 274. 


Ouananiche, 191, 197, 198, 210, 
211, 213-215, 252 ff., 271. 

Oven: the shrine of the good 
housewife, 201. 

Paley, the Rev. Dr.: quoted, 116. 

Patience: not the only virtue, 41. 

Peasant-life: the perils of, in the 
Tyrol, 172-174. 

Perch: a good fish for nurses to 
catch, 39. 

Philosophers: a camp of, 76; their 
explanation of humour, 143. 

Philosophy: of a happy life, 110; 
of travel, 143; of success, 155; 
of housekeeping, 257-259; of 
perpetual youth, 273-275. 

Photography: its difficulties, 77- 
79; a good occupation for young 
women, 124. 

Pian, Mount, 165. 

Pike, 203, 210, 251. 

Pleasures: simple, not to be pur- 
chased with money, 142. 

Plenty: a symbol of, 63. 

Prayer: the secret of peace, 112, 
113; in a Tyrolese hut, 177; 
thoughts almost as good as, 241. 

Preaching: under supervision, 89. 

Predestination: an instance of 
faith in, 99. 

Prime, W. C.: quoted, 249. 

Pronunciation: courage in, 121. 

Prosperity : should be prepared for 
in the time of adversity, 200. 

Quarles, Francis: his emblems, 35. 

Quebec, 246. 

Railway travel: beside a little 
river, 18; its general character, 
144. 

Rapids, 187 ff. 


287 


INDEX 


Relations: the advantage of tem- 
porary separation from, 259; 
distinguished from connections 
by marriage, 260. 

Religion: the best evidence of, 112. 

Resignation: the courage of old 
age, 110. 

Rivers: their personality, 9, 12; 
in different countries, 14; little 
ones the best, 15-18; methods 
of knowing them, 19, 20; advan- 
tages of their friendship, 19-26; 
their small responsibilities, 28; 
pleasure of watching them, 137; 
variety of life upon, 198; dis- 
consolate when dry, 208; merry 
in the rain, 225; the voice of, 
269. 

Rivers named: 

Abana, 15. 

iEsopus, 18 . 

Allegash, 17. 

A rOurs, 199, 202. 

Amazon, 17. 

Ampersand, 17, 61. 

Arno, 17, 19. 

Aroostook, 17. 

Ausable, 17. 

Batiscan, 14. 

Beaverkill, 17, 20. 

Blanche, 208. 

Boite, 146, 147. 

Boquet, 14. 

Cam, 19. 

Connecticut, 15. 

Dee, 106. 

Delaware, 15. 

Des Aimes, 198. 

Dove, 17, 122. 

Drau, 170. 

Ericht, 17. 

French Broad, 18. 

Glommen, 18. 


Rivers named: 

Grand D^charge, 186 ff., 249 
ff. 

Gula, 18. 

Halladale, 17. 

Hudson, 15. 

Isel, 170. 

Kaaterskill, 51-53. 

La Belle Riviere, 185, 260 ff. 
La Pipe, 185. 

Lycoming, 47. 

Metapedia, 121. 

Mississippi, 17. 

Mistassini, 185, 

Mistook, 192. 

Moose, 17. 

Neversink, 17, 52. 

Niagara, 17. 

Opalescent, 55. 

Ouiatchouan, 185. 

Patapedia, 121. 

Penobscot, 17. 

Peribonca, 17, 185, 215 ff. 
Pharpar, 15. 

Piave, 146, 147. 

Pikouabi, 185. 
Quatawamkedgwick, 121. 
Raquette, 17. 

Rauma, 17. 

Rienz, 18, 146. 

Ristigouche, 17, 117 ff. 

Rocky Run, 47. 

Rotha, 17. 

Saguenay, 184. 

Salzach, 17. 

Saranac, 17, 55, 64. 
Swiftwater, 17, 36, 56. 
Thames, 17, 19. 

Traun, 223 ff. 

Tweed, 17. 

Upsalquitch, 121. 

\^arfe, 190. 

Ziller, 17. 


288 


INDEX 


Roberval, 186. 

Rome: the best point of view in, 19. 

Rudder Grange: the author of, 13. 

St. John, Lake, 184 ff., 246 flF. 

Salmon: a literary, 92; a plain, 
129-132; a delusive, 134-136; 
curious habit of leaping on Sun- 
day, 137; manner of angling 
for, 128-130. 

Sea, the : disadvantages of loving, 9. 

Semiramis: her husband, 16. 

Seneca, L. Annaeus: his advice 
concerning altars, 11. 

Scotch character: contrasted with 
the English, 93-95; caution, 89, 
101; Orthodoxy, 103; true re- 
ligion, 109-112. 

Seriousness: may be carried too 
far, 30. 

Shakspere, William: quoted, 245. 

Slosson, Annie Trumbull: her story 
of Fishin’ Jimmy, 272. 

Solomon: improved, 38; quoted, 
90. 

Songs, French, 266 ff. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis : on rivers, 
8; on friendship between young 
and old, 109; his last prayer, 
112; on camping-out, 261. 

Stornoway, 87 ff. 

Sunday: reflections upon, 135-137; 
a good way to spend, 272-274. 

Sun-fish: their superciliousness 
when over-fed, 39. 

Tea: preferred to whisky, 196. 

Tennyson, Alfred: quoted, 13, 24, 
29, 46, 120, 209. 

Tents: their superiority to houses, 
246, 247. 

Time, old Father: the best way to 
get along with, 125. 


Titian: his landscapes, 147. 

Toblach, Lake of, 167, 168. 

Trees: their human associations, 
10-11; their growth on moun- 
tains, 72-74; advisability of 
sparing, 199; on their way to 
market, 207; their personality, 
302. 

Trees named: 

Alder, 47, 202, 224. 

Ash, 270. 

Balm of Gilead, 35, 200. 

Balsam, 73, 190, 209, 248, 258. 

Beech, 71. 

Birch, white, 48, 190, 214, 
249 ff. 

Birch, yellow, 70. 

Cedar, white, 190, 209, 213. 

Fir, 172, 224, 239. 

Hemlock, 15, 22, 47, 73, 248. 

Horse-chestnut, 10. 

Larch, 148. 

Maple, 9, 47, 70. 

Oak, 11, 239. 

Pine, 73. 

Poplar, 200, 224. 

Pussywillow, 3, 31. 

Spruce, 15, 72-74, 190, 207, 
209, 213, 248, 261. 

Trout-fishing: a beginning at, 41; 
a specimen of, 65; in Scotland, 
95, 96, 100-102; in the Tyrol, 
164, 167; in the Traum, 223 ff.; 
in Canada, 127, 201 ff., 261 ff. 

Universe: no man responsible for 
the charge of it, continuously, 
30. 

Utilitarianism: a mistake, 200. 

Venice: in warm weather, 143, 144. 

Veracity: affected by fish, 211. 

Virgil; quoted, 223. 


289 


INDEX 


Walton, Izaak: quoted, 29, 31, 65, 
142, 229; his ill fortune as a 
fisherman, 138. 

Warner, Charles Dudley: his 
description of an open fire, 
17. 

Watts, Isaac: quoted, 16. 

Whitman, Walt: quoted, 213. 

Wilson, John: his description of a 
bishop, 27; his scepticism about 
all fish stories but his own, 
271. 

Wish: a modest, 3-5. 


Wolfgang, Saint: his lake, 238; his 
good taste, 239. 

Women: prudence in expressing an 
opinion about, 16; more con- 
servative than men, 156; prob- 
lematic quality of, 245; generous 
rivals (in angling), 256. 

Words: their magic, 183. 

Wordsworth, William: quoted, 24, 
103, 192, 208. 

Youth: the secret of preserving it, 
274. 


290 






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